I’m not sure people entirely remember the film Audition. Like much of his body of work, director Takashi Miike’s breakthrough into global recognition is perhaps…
Squeal is an occasionally striking study of the fairy tales men tell themselves, but it too often feels floundering and under-cooked to be regarded as…
While his first directorial credit for a commercial project was released a decade after the Movie Brats first took hold of Hollywood in the late…
Glorious is stylish and occasionally pretty funny, but its lightweight genre pleasures are entirely undermined by a bafflingly stupid final twist. It’s hard to completely…
Beast is a sturdy, no-frills thriller that understands how to shred nerves and deliver gnarly creature-feature action. The B-movie creature feature comes roaring back with…
The titles of Mikio Naruse’s films were once baroque mouthfuls (Three Sisters With Maiden Hearts, Wife Be Like a Rose!), but as his own filmmaking…
The morning after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, folks at Memorial Medical Center rejoiced. The sun was shining. The facility still had power…
When I Consume You starts strong and boasts a strong visual character, but it frustratingly trades too heavily in tired horror tropes to land with much…
The Legend of Molly Johnson can skew a bit too on-the-nose at times, but it remains a bold, uncompromising work and the best kind of revisionist…
Rule 34 At its core, the intellectual thesis of Julia Murat’s intelligent if inconclusive film belies a more emotional investment. As its title might imply,…
Super Hero is an impressive step forward in animation for the franchise, even as its constant winking can sometimes come off as an insecure plea for…
Three Minutes can veer off course when it attempts to wax poetic or philosophical, but on the strength of its source material, ultimately proves an adept…
Orphan: First Kill lacks the pulpy playfulness and satirical intent of the original, entirely misunderstanding its appeal and rendering this sequel an underwhelming curiosity at best.…
Spin Me Round, which bafflingly sidelines its most intriguing performer halfway through, ultimately offers little more than a light subversion of European vacay romcoms. Jeff…
Beyoncé Dropping just over a month after Drizzy’s divisive, house music-inflected megamix, listening through Beyoncé’s sinuous dance record might provoke commentary like the text that…
Girl Picture is a pop-oriented confection of little substance, vapid writing, and seeming contempt for its characters. Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture is a confounding frustration. Set…
“The mise-en-scène flexes emotion like you flex your muscles.” So said Bertrand Tavernier of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or, an observation applicable to the latter’s all…
Human Flowers of Flesh Bouncing back from two years worth of Covid-related disruption while still riding out some major switch-ups and art direction, the Locarno…
Summering is a clichéd and ludicrous attempt at the coming-of-age tale, both thematically and tonally inept. It’s been nearly a decade since writer-director James Ponsoldt…
Like most of Yuasa’s feature-length works, Inu-Oh lacks the dimension of his small screen output, and indulges the director’s sloppiest storytelling instincts. Masaaki Yuasa simply…