Snakehead foregrounds its lead actress to magnificent effective, offering a film far more singular than its generic setup suggests. Snakehead starts with a rather deceptively benign…
The Two Sights can get a bit bogged down in esoteric gobbledygook, but Bonnetta’s image-making and aural noodling make for a mostly compelling ethnographic work. Filmed…
Llosa does her best to capture the delirium of the source material, but Fever Dream can’t quite sustain its dizzying, eerie tenor. Claudia Llosa’s Fever Dream is…
The Estate succeeds in delivering cult-ready laughs, but feels entirely superficial and neutered as satire. A designer-rags to even-more-riches fable from director James Kapner and writer/leading…
Endless Night is a film of well-meaning political engagement that succeeds only at conveying the intentionality of its aims. Endless Night falls into a recent spate…
Obayashi’s final film is an apporpriately madcap, delirious submersion into the very heart of cinema, and is an articulation of its power in a despairing…
At the Ready engaged necessary discourse, but unfortunately leaves its most fertile sites for interrogation unexplored. In light of the surging unpopularity of its subject matter,…
Villeneuve’s Dune is a gorgeous, monumental, and thrilling take on Herbert’s material, only slightly hampered by a weak finale that anticipates an intended Part Two. It’s the…
Night Teeth is a generic, derivative DTV trifle that fails to make its vampire story vampy enough. Onto the heap of DTV detritus you can now…
The French Dispatch is the latest Wes Anderson film to be utterly encumbered by the director’s propeller-beanie twee and flattened storytelling chops. For better or for…
Louis Wain has one distinctly lovely stretch, but it’s shrouded in pervasive busyness and zaniness that ultimately sinks the whole enterprise. Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of…
Lucky Chan-sil is a delicate, deeply humanist film superbly anchored by Kang’s lead performance. “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in…
Halloween Kills is a smug bit of a ill-advised fan service with dull kills, sanctimonious plot beats, and little narrative progression. David Gordon Green’s 2018 take…
Broadcast Signal Intrusion is built on used parts, but Gentry executes his vision with queasy dread and necessary ambiguity. Working late nights transferring tapes of old…
André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his lack…
The Last Duel is another win for Scott, an agreeably brutal, wickedly incisive tale that is considerably more substantive than mere Rashomon comps. Blending his lavish but…
Kanye West The announcement of a new Kanye West album — his tenth in fact — brought with it the delighted attention of the usual,…
Parallel Mothers If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest…
The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician,…
After Asako I & II, Hamaguchi’s latest can’t help but feel like something of a step backward into less aesthetically daring filmmaking. “Once Again”, the third…
The French Dispatch For better or for worse, there are few working American auteurs whose visual stamps are as broadly and immediately recognizable as Wes…