It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s The Idiot(s) hates its subjects. The film purports to chronicle the events around Fyodor…
Passion is subsumed into stricture in Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering, a graceful Burmese drama about the relationship between two colleagues at a garment factory. Patient…
Ok class, raise your hands if you would be excited to watch a nearly three-hour film about chess? I’m sure there are plenty of In…
At first glance, Dominik Moll’s Case 137 looks a lot like his last film, the César-winning The Night of the 12th. That film was a…
In the early 1990s, Derek Jarman’s career was at a crucial inflection point. The BBC was starting to fund feature films, and Derek’s angry, queer…
Aaron Sorkin began his directing career at the tender age of 56, decidedly later than most. As one of Hollywood’s most widely celebrated screenwriters, he…
Rob Savage’s Other Mommy can best be described as confident: a bold step in the direction of an ample, maximalist horror. But it is seldom…
Sometimes, the riskiest thing to do can be to play it safe. With her 2016 breakthrough and solo directorial debut, Wolf and Sheep, Shahrbanoo Sadat…
Though Western cinephiles are likely most familiar with Herman Yau through the grisly Category III shockers he made with Anthony Wong (Taxi Hunter, The Untold…
There are movies we find undoubtedly bad — movies that get us worked up, that offend us, that ruin our day — but that at…
The thematic programs in MoMA’s retrospective commemorating the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop are generally grouped around certain political (“Make Love Not War”), poetic…
Luca Guadagnino’s neo-realist farce Artificial presents a parade of dipshits: 1) figuratively, as it introduces us to the careless architects of what many believe is…
A new horror short from Demon Knight and Bones director Ernest R. Dickerson is the best reason to see V/H/S: Mixtape, but even his segment…
“Can the copy of something embody the truth of its original self?” The world we have built for ourselves is an ersatz one. We gaze…
In Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon, Josette (Josette Kwanya) is a widowed 80-year-old living alone in her vast house. All her children are scattered…
Animals, the new Netflix film from director-(co-)writer-actor Ben Affleck, is an uncredited adaptation of Ed McBain’s (nom de plume of writer Evan Hunter) 1959 novel…
God, girlhood is tough. Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all experience of being a young girl; we all likely know this, but the diversity of youth…
In this dispatch: The Debut, For the…
A couple of weeks ago, I went to a screening of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (2013) at the Metrograph in Lower Manhattan. I am a…
Ava DuVernay’s 13th is one of the most influential documentaries of the 21st century, for better or worse. Released at the tipping point between the…
After having seen A Real Pain, one might ascribe a certain set of proclivities to Jesse Eisenberg-as-director: an easygoing affability, a penchant for the gentle…