Underground Kaori Oda’s Underground is a film built around the meanings of its title, but it’s also apparently built up to 83 minutes out of…
After a rich and varied March release landscape, April came back down to Earth a bit. There were still exciting, under-the-radar releases (Gazer, Henry Fonda…
In 2001, Jia Zhangke made Unknown Pleasures, in which Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao Qiao who tries to make a living as a…
“The world’s most important and influential band breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” Thus begins Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, establishing from the jump…
Joel Potrykus offered viewers a kind of hell on earth in 2014 when he released Buzzard, a crusty cumrag of a movie about the drudgery…
There’s a deadpan finality in the titular utterance of Iair Said’s first fiction feature, a contrived despondency passing off as statistical fact. In Most People…
Swamp Dogg is a workhorse. The mercurial musician and producer, born Jerry Williams Jr., began his all-but-auspicious career at age 12 under the moniker Little…
What kind of Nicolas Cage fan are you? Maybe you like the deliberate, soulful Cage of Pig or Adaptation. Or maybe you prefer the manic…
A cascading slant of coastal daylight betrays the futile dangers of vacation time in Durga Chew-Bose’s sensual, stilling, and elegiac rendition of Françoise Sagan’s 1954…
What is it going to take for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to right the ship? Even the monolith’s most diehard fans are starting to lose…
Not all cinema exists to tell a story. Certain filmmakers may refer to themselves as storytellers, and certain writers on may claim that the story…
It’s been eight years since The Raid director Gareth Evans served as the man behind the camera on a feature film (that would be 2018’s…
While the title gives the impression that this is an Asylum-style mockbuster ripping off the little-loved Brad Pitt-starring Bullet Train, the new Bullet Train Explosion…
There are few genuinely pleasurable elements in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses. Adapted by Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name, the…
There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined oppressive…
Much has been written about the veritable glut of garbage films put out by the various streaming services in the post-COVID landscape, to the point…
If you know anything at all about French director François Ozon, then you realize just how little we know about him. Sure, we have all…
Stray dogs, lone horses, and rampant horniness may not make for pleasing documentary subject matter, but they add to the sense of joie de vivre…
In Fire Island, director Andrew Ahn and writer/actor Joel Kim Booster retrofitted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not just as a means to reflect the…
What can be done with the anger that tragedy bears? Brett Neveu wrote Eric LaRue for the stage in the wake of the Columbine massacre,…