A Hero is Farhadi’s best work in a minute, still hampered by the director’s anonymous formal style, but otherwise delivering another masterful work of drama. Few…
The tame, backwards Sex Appeal has very little appeal indeed. New Hulu original Sex Appeal is tailor-made to be watched at sleepovers by undiscerning pretween girls looking…
Introduction bears a fitting title, as it feels like something distinctly new within Hong’s self-reflexive oeuvre. It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo, so…
The Last Thing Mary Saw is sedate bit of moody horror that takes an array of cinematic reference points and flattens them until there’s little…
Boy Harsher’s foray into filmmaking is a bit clunky, but The Runner certainly doesn’t lack for ambition or vibes. Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have…
“This boy… and this girl… were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” So begins the dramatic voice-over of Nicholas Ray’s debut feature,…
Belle as a leaden mess of abject sentimentality and perfunctory technological tedium. If there’s anything to be gleaned from Belle, it’s this: Mamoru Hosoda has…
Italian Studies is a banal, ponderous work that fails to land on any interesting or governing thesis. Dislocation and dissociation lie at the heart of…
“A little more passion, though, would have been appreciated.” So says Dave Kehr of American — by way of London by way of France —…
The House isn’t quite a home, its neat little anthology package coming too much untied in a miscalculated final leg. The latest in Netflix’s endless stream…
Brazen is slickly made, but it’s otherwise firmly rooted in ’80s Lifetime thriller territory. As a title, Brazen sounds a little old-fashioned, a promise of titillation…
2022’s Scream is a sincere betrayal of the franchise’s legacy and devoid of Craven’s masterful craft and play. A rejoinder to a dead subgenre, Wes Craven’s 1996…
The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev’s debut feature The Whaler Boy takes us…
An imperfect film, The Pink Cloud nonetheless stands as one of the defining pandemic texts despite — or perhaps because of — its predated genesis. Iuli Gerbase’s…
Shattered is a sleazy erotic thriller knockoff, one that never realizes its camp potential but which boasts a few poor-taste pleasures along the way. Hidden within…
Expedition Content takes to task the supremacy of the visual in film, delivering a vibrant, versatile work of experimental ethnography. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition Content…
Woodlands Dark is exceedingly thoughtful and never less than riveting despite its length, a film destined to become an important work of criticism. In 2012,…
Calling Tsai Ming-liang’s body of work interconnected doesn’t begin to cover the throughlines that have developed over the span of more than three decades. One…
A week awaited, but our writers’ Top 5 Albums of 2021 have arrived. Long-time readers may not be surprised with our pick for #1, but…
Misguided as female-driven blockbuster and unappealing as actioner, The 355 offers little to chew on. There is something rather refreshing in the fact that new action…