The first film that came to this writer’s mind while watching Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s debut feature Tendaberry was Spike Lee’s 2020 short New York New…
Hell of a Summer is an easy film to dislike. A summer camp slasher that unabashedly and quite winkingly wears the skin of its forebears…
The two sequences that form the beginning of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April set a mood of violent unease. We follow a faceless creature, vaguely humanoid despite…
In the near-decade since it came out, The Accountant has become a Dad Movie classic, beloved (some might say inexplicably) by anyone looking for something…
In a movie titled A Normal Family, one thing can be certain: the family is obligated to abnormality. Hur Jin-ho’s newest film, an adaptation of…
After 2021’s El Planeta, Amalia Ulman ups the ante with her second feature, Magic Farm, in every conceivable way. Black-and-white cinematography here gives way to…
About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas are…
Shot on grainy 16mm and scored by loopy, synth approximations of classical instruments, Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail sets up a dialectical battle…
The rapid ascension of Ryan Coogler as a pop-filmmaker of some stature has taken a somewhat counterintuitive route. After bursting onto the scene with an…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve…
I was not surprised that I was deeply charmed by young Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills To Pay, which screened at this year’s New Directors/New…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of…
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is an impressionistic look at a small beach town in South Florida awaiting a large Hurricane to pass through. Simpson’s…
Mad Bills to Pay “The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills…
“The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny,…
The middle class context of Kostis Charamountanis’ Kyuka: Before Summer’s End gives its story of a languid, European summer vacation a refreshingly dressed-down feel. Like…
One of the harshest realities in life is a lack of closure. The sudden death of a loved one, the dissolution of a serious relationship,…
The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism, unintended…
When last we left Alex Garland, he was busy parsing the American left/right divide and the moral responsibilities of war journalism in the phenomenally stupid…
Rhetorically, the threatening specter of militarism looms just out of frame in Makbul Mubarak’s debut feature, Autobiography, a work extrapolated from the political and ideological…