By the time of Taboo’s 1999 release, after a 13-year period of filmic silence, Nagisa Ôshima had already released what could be considered two capstone…
Babi Yar. Context is another notable work from Loznitsa, one that represents an important act of remembrance while also remaining frustratingly vague and lacking in, ironically,…
One of the primary games played by the motley, ever-expanding group of Hong Sang-soo lovers is that of contextualizing and recontextualizing each film within his…
Mothering Sunday fills its frames with striking images and gorgeously appointed spaces to the point of mind-numbing banality. There’s a certain kind of film, one that…
Superior sources a number of eerie genre influences in the creation of a bold, singular debut. Functioning as both an expansion and direct continuation of her…
7 Days is a high-concept rom-com that ends up feeling defanged by narrative missteps and inconsistent chemistry. Karan Soni and Geraldine Viswanathan star in 7 Days,…
Spoon Though we are emerging from Q1 2022 on shaky ground globally speaking, this recent past has already been canonized as a banner micro-era elsewhere…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or…
Avril Lavigne When Let Go, Avril Lavigne’s debut album, was released twenty years ago, it arrived with the force of an earthquake. The artist was…
A smoothly stitched assemblage of narrative and documentary modes, Wood and Water rides a sedate wavelength to effortless but earned poignancy. The most endearing moments of Jonas…
You Are Not My Mother is appealingly steeped in the folk-horror tradition, but has a suffocating visual aesthetic and the unfortunately distinct feel of a padded-out…
Cha Cha Real Smooth With only two features under his belt, 24-year-old writer/director/leading man/wunderkind Cooper Raiff has already developed an idiosyncratic style that can most…
Master is impressively textured formally and presents is nuanced in its discursive considerations, but fails to muster many scares as a horror film. Amongst the cohort…
Credited with reimagining and popularizing the traditional Italian hand gesture of malocchio (“evil eye”) into what’s today (in)famously known as “devil’s horns” in heavy metal…
X is a gnarly throwback horror that sheds the genre’s present obsession with being about something and just slings blood and jokes for the duration of its runtime. …
Emergency The college party movie, usually fronted by a couple smarmy white dudes, gets a challenge with Emergency, a fascinating but ultimately ineffective piece of…
Timelessness is a crucial thing of nature — where sediments erode and seas dry, nature par excellence remains unchanged, a totality to reckon with, yet…
Panama is a muddled and befuddling film, offering a few choice Neveldine aesthetic choices but otherwise exhibiting a confused embrace of cliché. Intended as a temporary…
Windfall doesn’t have much depth but works quite well as a slick and playful noir trifle. Filmmaker Charlie McDowell has established a flair for filtering the…
Cheaper by the Dozen is successful at counting to 12 and basically nothing else. The Disney-Fox merger has been something of a boon for the House…