The Devil All the Time abandons any meaningful Southern Gothic tradition or thematic complexity in favor of base misery. Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time…
The Best Is Yet to Come Think Spotlight but shot by Yu Lik-wai, Jia Zhang-ke’s favorite DP. Sounds pretty neat, right? And for a…
The Disciple Sharad Nerulkar — the titular disciple in Chaitanya Tamhane’s sophomore feature — is, by most accounts, unexceptional. He’s devoted his life to…
Antebellum is a vapid, one-gimmick flick that plays like a politically impotent episode of Black Mirror. There’s still plenty of debate over cinematic depictions of slavery…
The Paramedic is the gleeful, glorious pulp-trash the world needs right now. New Spanish-language thriller The Paramedic wastes no time in establishing its title character, Angel…
Pieces of a Woman Director Kornél Mundruczó knows how to open a film (see the otherwise underwhelming White God, for example), and with Pieces…
Soul Emir Ezwan’s debut feature, Soul, is part of an emerging Malaysian cinema heavily composed of genre fare. Made for roughly $80,000 USD, the…
Residue is a singular, important achievement, a work of shattering beauty and necessary discourse. Director Merawi Gerima was born into an impressive cinematic lineage. His…
Spiral is content lean into cheap scare tactics at the expense of the more novel, potent direction is could have taken. New horror thriller…
Night of the Kings Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature, whose structural integrity depends upon a viewer’s willingness to…
The Nest is a deeply obvious, under-cooked attempt at horror-flecked domestic portraiture. The Nest, writer-director Sean Durkin’s long-awaited follow-up to his remarkably assured debut feature,…
Lahi, Hayop Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s filmography is virtually an exemplar of the temporal nexus of historical and contemporaneous representations of authoritarian…
In the midst of the annus horribilis of 2020, with the US still being ravaged by a global pandemic, all manner of racial strife,…
Nomadland Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip…
Legally Declared Dead Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and…
There never was a romance quite like it: beat poets/star-crossed lovers Exene Cervenka and John Doe form a little rock band with guitarist Billy…
Unleashed & Geran Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good…
Mainstream Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has demonstrated its allure among filmmakers, and it’s easy to…