Gagarine is a small film, but one impressive in the balance of wonder and stark melancholy it conjures. Against the harsh realities of time and…
One of the most paradoxically romantic scenes in any film ever can be found in Alexander Mackendrick’s second film for Ealing Studios, 1951’s The Man…
The Bubble is a self-indulgent, unfunny mess of a film that continues Apatow’s sharp artistic decline. Few modern comedies have been as self-indulgent, unfunny, strangely dated,…
Barbarians is blunt-force cinema at its worst, beating viewers over the head with its shallow, pseudo-provocative gabble. Barbarians is a home-invasion thriller that desperately wants to…
Moonshot never takes off, any potential low-key rom-com pleasures undercut by a flattened sense of conflict and by-the-numbers plotting. Once a reliable Hollywood staple, the romantic…
Night’s End is a Frankensteined mess of horror movie modes that never achieves any formal or thematic cogency. Jennifer Reeder has always gravitated toward highly particular…
Everything Everywhere All at Once, true to its title, can be a little chaotic and unruly, but it’s still a hilarious and impeccably crafted bit of…
Adele Exarchopoulos makes this French import worth at least a couple fucks. The mid-midlife crisis genre has always been a bit of a mixed bag,…
Nitram is the worst sort of armchair investigation — one that reopens wounds it doesn’t bother to heal. The True History of the Kelly Gang was…
Apollo 10 ½ is another wonderful work of melancholic yesteryear from cinema’s foremost purveyor of childhood nostalgia. Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood finds writer-director…
Bull offers genre fans 80 minutes of satisfyingly amoral brutality, but its swing-for-the-fences finale misses the mark. There’s no shortage of revenge pictures out there; at…
The Contractor isn’t much for ambition, but it accomplishes precisely what it sets out to, and lets Chris Pine have a little fun in the meantime.…
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…