Annihilation practically sits up and begs to be regarded as high-minded genre cinema. But really, it’s a thuddingly literal handful of barely engaged ideas and dangling plot…
Black Panther arrives with a lot of fanfare; it’s sure to generate discussion about its status as a genuinely progressive piece of representation, and it…
Pivoting from the cerebral intensity of Queen of Earth — an Images, or Fassbinder, -like exteriorization of a woman’s mental breakdown — Alex Ross Perry’s latest is…
The finest films of 2017 simultaneously offered us a respite from, and a deeper reflection on, our fraught and fractured social and political realities. In…
The best songs and albums released over the last 12 months found a way to subvert a hopeless political reality, to move and inspire us…
#32: Beyond the Masked Tortilla: Musicians Making Movies Download episode here. Episode Description: “This is where we came in…” Like guilty men returning to the scene of…
Perhaps in answer to fans who complained that The Force Awakens was just a collection of rehashed elements and nostalgia with a shiny paint job, Rian…
Our fifth and final dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (here’s one, two, three, and four) includes a couple of films about various forms of…
Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei takes a powerful look at the global refugee crisis in his new documentary Human Flow. Whether the refugees come from Syria,…
Our fourth dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (here’s one, two, and three) includes the Chinese-American filmmaker Chloé Zhao’s docudrama The Rider, about South Dakotan…
The Foreigner has the same elements as any number of generic procedurals: innocent victims are killed in a terrorist bomb blast, law enforcement officers track down leads…
In our third dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (the first is here, second here): the “director’s cut” version of Arnaud Desplechin’s sprawling career summation, Ismael’s Ghosts;…
It’s worth remembering that, at the time of its 1982 initial release, nobody really knew what to make of, or much cared for, Blade Runner. Ridley…
In our second dispatch from this year’s New York Film Festival (the first is here), we take a look at the veteran Polish filmmaker Agnieszka…
Most seem to agree at this point that the Cannes Film Festival’s competition line-up was not good this year. While the New York Film Festival’s main…
For our third and final dispatch from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s number one, here’s number two), we take a look at the film…
Our second dispatch from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (you can find the first here; the third and final one will be up on…
The fall film festival season is already in full swing, but the Toronto International Film Festival stands out due to its emphasis on commercialism, and its…
It’s difficult to argue that Darren Aronofsky’s films are poorly executed, at least on a formal level; his largely allegorical works are often manic, intense,…
We have a lot planned for the fall film festival season—including multiple dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. But first,…