Brahmāstra Part One: Shiva is a soulless mega-franchise starter that does very little of interest with its massive budget. Chances are, you already know what…
It can sometimes feel that Hold Me Tight coasts by on mood alone, but Amalric maximizes that mode, orchestrating his film’s disorienting tone with virtuosic…
God’s Country is an arrogant and painfully writerly project that is only occasionally uplifted on the strength of its visual flourish. A classic sort of…
Sandwiched in the middle of the late-summer/early-autumn run of major international film festivals, coming on the heels of Locarno, Venice, and Telluride and immediately before…
Pinocchio is a fascinating late-period work from Zemeckis, one that takes in the full scope of his career as he wills us to believe in the…
Cousins’ latest The Story of Film entry largely trades in hyperbole, platitude, and bland observation, rendering it little more than a 150-minute trailer binge. For many…
Honk For Jesus’ plot is unevenly distributed and its tone a bit imbalanced, but it ultimately lands as a solid sendup of toxic church culture sold…
Master Gardener In hindsight, Paul Schrader’s career has been a repeated jettisoning and reappropriation of extraneous artiness, new off-kilter filmic shapes of inscrutable quality emerging…
The Cathedral is D’Ambrose’s portrait of the artist as a young man, a bracingly vigorous work and a precise survey of emotional turmoil. After a series…
Speak No Evil is a grueling experience in the best possible sense, punctuating by a giddily mean-spirited and pitch-perfect ending. Like an unholy amalgamation of Michael…
House of Darkness absolutely butchers its attempt at a female empowerment tale, landing somewhere between overtly offensive and appallingly stupid. It’s feast or famine when it…
One of the most enjoyable films presented in this year’s Crossroads Festival is also one of the shortest. In Object Permanence, Alix Blevins offers the…
Like the best fiction for young children, the secret to Roald Dahl’s bibliography is its sensory qualities, that it can unlock new pathways in the…
In the first three days that doctors and patients were trapped inside Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the body count was around…
Dos Estaciones is packed with precise images and lensed with beautiful attention to color and mise en scène, but it fails to satisfactorily develop its ideas.…
When Robert Zemeckis set about making preparations for his adaptation of Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary Marwencol, he was immediately confronted with a potentially project-killing conundrum.…
Ozon’s frivolous Fassbinder homage doesn’t quite engrave much that is substantive or memorable. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tragically short and tormented life has been the subject…
While not traditionally associated with the genre in the strictest sense, Robert Zemeckis has always indulged in the tropes and affects of horror even outside…
Despite his reputation as a mainstream hit-maker, Zemeckis has always had a wildly idiosyncratic relationship to both genre and film history. Not as obsessed with…
In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to, if…
After nearly a decade of directing expensive mo-cap animated films to variable box-office returns, the 2010s found Robert Zemeckis at a crossroads. The massive critical…