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…
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong Kong,…
It’s always a strange experience when a self-consciously campy horror film pulls out something genuinely emotional, if only for about a minute. Christopher Landon’s Drop…
DIRECT ACTION, co-directed by Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell, traces the outer contours and inner lives of the persons within the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes (the…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning call…
With his latest feature, director Robert Schwentke has moved away from his Time Traveler’s Wife, Divergent, Snake Eyes-days of bad blockbuster filmmaking. Seneca — On…
A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down…