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…
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick Filmmaker Pete Ohs’ working methods prioritize flexibility, openness, and spontaneity. As with all of his features…
Filmmaker Pete Ohs’ working methods prioritize flexibility, openness, and spontaneity. As with all of his features so far, his latest, The True Beauty of Being…
Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player) Greta…
After a numbing first couple months in 2025 cinema, March struck back in a big way, giving theatergoers a number of new films from idiosyncratic…
Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A story…