As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap hotel…
Nominated for five Academy Awards, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance has been one of the most talked about movies of the past year. Since its premiere…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences,…
Desert of Namibia At first, Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what this writer is calling Millennium Mambo-core, after…
The best of the experimental film programming at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2025 is actually found outside the program specifically dedicated…
Brigid McCaffrey’s debut feature plays very much like a pleasant walk in the woods. One is surrounded by the hazy glint of sunlight on foliage,…
There’s an opaque yet stern quality to Kaloyan (Ognyan “Fyre” Pavlov), a heavily tattooed young man returning to his small Bulgarian hometown after many years…
Director Craig Johnson has worked with alums of Saturday Night Live before: His 2014 film The Skeleton Twins featured nuanced leading performances from Kristen Wiig…
In a landscape crowded with thrillers about obsession and celebrity, Jimmy Warden’s Borderline tries to carve out its own space, mixing ‘90s nostalgia, dark humor,…
The most experimental regional cinema in the world might belong to the Arab Levant. As a region destabilized by a non-Indigenous oppressive neighbor for virtually…
In The Actor, memory pulls at the neck of Paul Cole (André Holland) like a diving tether that threatens to snap at every turn of…
Given the well-publicized fate of the ostensibly never-to-be-released Coyote vs. Acme, it’s sort of a miracle that there’s a new Looney Tunes movie at all,…
Since his emergence on the periphery of the “New French Extremity” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bruno Dumont has continued to carve out…
In the opening scene of Who by Fire, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s latest feature, a car pulls over along a highway for a brief rest…
You could argue that it’s extremely ironic that The Electric State, an absolutely dismal movie about humanity learning to love corporate-branded A.I. robots rising up…
Set in the year 2019, An Unfinished Film is a fictional documentary about a film crew that reunites to finish a queer feature from 10…
Independent American filmmaking in the 1970s features many showcases of distinctive actor-director relationships. One of them: Joan Micklin Silver and her many great actors, including…
Suspended Time Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has…
In Aude Léa Rapin’s sci-fi drama, Planet B, the French government has imprisoned dissidents in a virtual prison. Bodies are kept in a vegetative state…
In a concise opening, Thierry de Peretti’s In His Own Image introduces its heroine Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo), a young and passionate photographer who seems to…