Inland Empire is to Mulholland Drive how Twin Peaks: The Return is to the first two seasons of Twin Peaks — a film/TV series about…
Million Dollar Baby might open abruptly onto a brightly lit boxing ring, with two men contained in its boundaries and loudly grunting as they vigorously…
In the Mouth In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison…
It’s a sign of great writing when you can identify everything you love and hate about a character, but can’t decide whether you love or…
Coming-of-age movies are a dime a dozen, at this point practically an entire sub-genre of Sundance-approved indie calling cards. Which is perhaps why Henry Bernadet’s…
Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with…
In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to…
The title of Erica Xia-Hou’s stirring if conspicuous first feature is not a misprint: “banr,” translated and truncated from the Mandarin term for “partner,” serves…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon death,…
Watching Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos’ Blood Beat in 2025 is a wild sensory experience. It has the (ahem) beats of a slasher while boasting atmospheric sound design,…
In Oz Perkins’ The Monkey, a mechanical wind-up monkey that plays a drum (but don’t call it a toy) serves as a harbinger of death.…
The title appears like a misnomer. At a tight 67 minutes, and with such glorious irreverence embedded within its form, Broken Rage doesn’t even need…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a…
“How would you define Black genius?” So comes the question from Questlove at the top of his documentary SLY LIVES!, posed to a remarkable assortment…
Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky’s debut feature Rats! is a bit impossible to describe. There’s a story in there, somewhere, involving nuclear weapons, missing “hans”…
In Alice Lowe’s first feature since Prevenge in 2016, which announced the actress and writer as a talented director to boot, we are witness to…
When Chris Evans left the role of Steve Rogers in Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe turned to his colleague Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon…
In Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play two of the best snipers in the world representing, respectively, the superpowers of the…
Like every other movie in the franchise, Michael Morris’ fourth installment, Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy, begins with a prologue delivered by Bridget Darcy…
Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of…