In 1951, the Minamata-based Chisso corporation was one of Japan’s leading producers of acetaldehyde, a then in-demand chemical compound that the company had begun to…
Poupelle of Chimney Town At this point, it’s fairly useless to ascribe Studio Ghibli qualities to any new anime release, so diluted have such comparisons…
Near its end, Gully gives a glimpse of what a less maximalist, more successful version of itself would look like, but it comes too late.…
Akilla’s Escape is an unfortunate mishmash of cliché and amateurism, never quite clear what it wants to say or be. Akilla’s Escape begins with a…
The risible Misfits marks a career low point for director Renny Harlin. Nick Cannon’s here too. Once, he was one of the most reliable directors of…
In a stronger film, Tragic Jungle’s metaphor and opacity would have a more elaborate, complex mythos to match. Yulene Olaizola’s elemental fifth feature, Tragic Jungle, is…
Rarely has horror felt as inert as it does in the tedious Censor. The opening credits to the new horror film Censor feature a montage…
Tove disrupts standard biopic conventions and mines meaning from its language-heavy approach. In a 1946 letter to her love Vivica Bandler, Swedish writer and artist Tove…
Scarecrow Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and…
In the Heights isn’t going to save the theatrical experience, but at 143 minutes, will help kill some time. In development since the musical made…
Spike Lee’s 1991 Jungle Fever, a work with a title and subject matter seemingly designed to court — indeed, demand — controversy, is at its…
In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often…
Caleb Michael Johnson’s sophomore feature amounts to little more than a clumsy attempt at intellectual horror. We open on a shot of a dog’s wagging…
Bad Tales certainly tries hard but comes off mostly like an artfully-directed after-school special. The stink of desperation wafts heavily from Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s…
The playfulness of Chantal Akerman is, throughout her work, always nebulous. A smile, a laugh, a tall-standing stride: these do not signify transparent gestures, so…
Beginning in 2015, following the (by all accounts exhausting) production of Phoenix, Christian Petzold returned to television, where he began his career in the 1990s…
2018’s Transit followed two period pieces, each set in a specific era highly important to director Christian Petzold: Barbara, which unfolds in East Germany in…
Any discussion of Phoenix almost begs to begin with the ending. One of the greatest mic-drop endings in all but the most literal sense, it…
IFFR returns this week, a short couple months after its last iteration. As a response to the pandemic, IFFR 2021 decided to split itself a…
Caveat teases potential and boasts an impressive setup, but ultimately loses its thread after this initial stretch. One of the challenges of the modern horror…
In retrospect, it almost seems odd that Christian Petzold’s international breakthrough effectively came with Barbara. Though it was his first period film, dealing with a…