How refreshing it is to see a debut film. Movies by established directors, even directors one likes, carry the burden of expectation. “Every movie is…
At the beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length documentary, Landmarks, we’re presented with satellite images of Earth. From this zoomed out perspective, there are no…
Sharon Lockhart adds 12 more static master shots to her filmography with Windward, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t finding new ideas for how to…
Benny Safdie, formerly of the eponymous directing team the Safdie brothers, makes his solo feature-directing debut with The Smashing Machine, and at a glance, the filmmaker…
The Strangers – Chapter 2 (directed by Renny Harlin) occurs in the immediate aftermath of the carnage of Chapter 1. The incredibly concise narrative timeline…
Of all the exceptional projects Jon Bois has delivered, his creation of a concept known as Scorigami is probably his most recognizable. First seen in…
It’s mid-September, a broadcast TV network is on the brink of a merger, and an evening news segment could blow up these lucrative plans and…
With the ever prolific Romanian auteur delivering banger after banger at breakneck speed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that 2025 is another…
Toward the beginning of Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.,” the rapper-cum-boardroom fixture adlibs a lament about a missed opportunity in real estate. “I coulda bought…
For better or worse, Brett Goldstein is always — or at least for the far foreseeable future — going to be associated with his Ted…
Most great cinema centers around The Other — people who, fairly or unfairly, feel out of step with the society around them. Their idiosyncrasies allow…
The Mastermind Of Kelly Reichardt’s many talents behind the camera, historically, she is not a filmmaker you would refer to as “a trickster” — there…
In 1974, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (henceforth EAAJAF) followed in the footsteps of the Japanese Red Army by committing several terrorist acts in…
It’s a shame I had to see Kent Jones’ Willem Dafoe vehicle, Late Fame, on the Upper West Side at NYFF in mid-September. It was…
Who among us can’t relate to Samuel Beckett’s post-apocalyptic word-worlds at the moment? The answer is apparently those who are too blind to see. El…
In 2017’s Summer 1993, director Carla Simón’s feature debut, a young girl is sent to live with her mother’s family in Barcelona after her mother’s…
A film festival architected from a premise of curatorial excellence rather than red carpet cachet, the New York Film Festival annually arrives with fewer expectations of first-glimpse prestige than of centralized access to the year's on-offer best. That being the case, it also means we've usually already caught up with a sizable chunk of NYFF's
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The story begins twice: once with newspaper headlines informing us that Antoine Monnier’s young Charles has died mysteriously, and then we go back to six…
“We learned punk rock in Hollywood.” – Minutemen Film culture feels at times like it’s reached a dead end in the Letterboxd generation, cinephilia no…
The biography of an artist is an artist’s nemesis. It aims a howitzer at artists and the body of their work. In its illuminating, explicatory…