“Cinema has something premonitory about it,” says Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), the cult director-turned-adman at the center of Bitter Christmas. It’s a statement director Pedro Almodóvar…
“Is there even a suspect? Is there even a crime?” These words spoken by Detective Mijares (Alchris Galura) are as good a summation as you’re…
In this dispatch: The Day She Returns…
Every time a Hong Sang-soo film plays at a film festival, one can assume someone in the audience is encountering the prolific filmmaker for the…
It is perhaps inevitable that a higher number of films are going to be focused on the difficulties of aging as birth rates decline and…
Shin Godzilla exists in a class of its own, nearly experimental in its focus on political red tape in the face of a developing catastrophe,…
You’d think it would be impossible to create a new vision of death and the afterlife after more than a century of cinematic depictions. A…
Schaumburg, Illinois is a nexus of American suburban living. The Chicago suburb is an affluent village that sits 25 miles outside the city proper; its…
Escaping from the claws of corporate homogeneity and shared cinematic universes is Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, almost certainly the strangest film…
In this dispatch: A Long Winter…
Andrew Haigh has proven adept, at times exceptionally so, at crossing diverse conceptual landscapes. His relationship dramas, of both the young and queer (Weekend, Looking,…
Virginia Woolf’s seminal novel Mrs. Dalloway is a daunting candidate for cinematic representation, relying as it does on the detailed evocation of the inner lives…
In this dispatch: Life of Jorge Luis Borges…
For the past decade, James Gray has been talked about in cinephile circles as the last great American (neo-)classist, the only auteur effectively continuing to…
“My father said you got to swallow your feelings.” Jimmy Page, the fictional actor at the center of Ira Sachs’ new film The Man I…
In his rather humbly titled “Autobiographical Notes” that appeared in the New Yorker in 1970, Jorge Luis Borges recounts the day in 1935 when, from her deathbed, his paternal grandmother Frances Haslam — “a respectable English lady” from the West Midlands — told her “Georgie” and the gathered family: “‘I am only an old woman
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The image of a lone warrior holding a child is baked into cinema’s fabric. From Lone Wolf and Cub to Hard Boiled, it’s iconography that…
NAZA is a film so powerful and so utterly terrifying that it should be watched by everyone. And still, it would feel wrong to slot…
Ted Kaczynski offers us one of the great case studies in worthwhile notions and piss-poor execution. It’s hard to look at his ideas and not…
Aficionados of the Dog Movie will tell you that there are several distinct strains therein. You’ve got your broad comedies, usually involving a large and…
The concept of a Japanese ghost story conjures up many spectacular images of hauntings from throughout cinema history. There are the vengeful spirits of classic…