Even among the film festival cognoscenti, experimental films sometimes inspire their fair share of confusion. This is to be expected, since the films in question…
There’s a spectrum of certain psychologically- or chemically-rooted qualities that most people who participate in extreme sports must have in order to succeed. But others,…
As the growth and ubiquity of AI continues to accelerate at a terrifyingly rapid rate, so do the horror films that seek to capitalize on…
In this dispatch: What Can’t Be…
The obvious thing to say about Dan Sallitt’s new film, What Can’t Be Mentioned, is that it can’t be fully appreciated without first seeing its…
As the title would have us to expect, Beatrice Gibson’s At Night is indeed (mostly) a nocturnal film, but Gibson does so much more than…
Having seen all six Currents shorts programs at this year’s New York Film Festival, Program 3: Surface Noise emerged as the most successful of the…
The raw, almost feral energy that Margaret Qualley can bring to her best roles often exists in fascinating tension with the serenity of her wide-eyed…
My prewar apartment building in Queens has a mind of its own when it comes to temperature regulation. As another nor’easter batters the city, you…
In this dispatch: Behemoth!, Bardi…
Alex Serian has been away for a long time. At the start of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, the gifted cellist (played with great commitment by Pedro…
There is a certain expectation that comes with a film’s selection for the Currents section of the New York Film Festival, not least because the…
It’s taken a while for cinephiles (including this writer) to catch up with the Vienna-based filmmaking duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Their profile…
In this dispatch: Possible Love, Heil…
Rare is the film that earnestly inspires you to hold your loved ones closer. Rarer still is the film that does so while making room…
Whatever one thinks of Carlos Reygadas, it’s hard to argue against his ability to open a movie. His newest film Heil Jupiter!, largely spoken in…
Partway through Verity, Dakota Johnson’s protagonist, well on her way to seducing her employer’s husband (played by Josh Hartnett), takes a bite out of a…
Where do you start with something like Digger? It’s smug, self-satisfied, cynical, but also genuinely bleak and actually pretty thoughtful. It wants desperately to be…
Parsing the cinema’s relation to sound, Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “…the sound as well as visual elements of the image enter into internal relations which…
In this dispatch: All of a Sudden…
The post-Drive My Car films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi have built a case for the director as the most acclaimed contemporary filmmaker in the world. Even…