The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly in-joke of changing…
As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite possibly…
“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power…
Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s Gaucho Gaucho is a mesmerizing study of form and image-making, a film as preoccupied with its subjects as it is…
Coming on the heels of Thursday’s Thanksgiving football, it’s fitting when discussing Our Little Secret to take a quick look back at seemingly innocuous moment…
There are few rings of cinematic hell worse than bad broad comedies. Watching Rasmus Merivoo’s Alien 2 or: The Return of Valdis in 17 Episodes…
When I attended the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year, I was struck by the festival’s efforts to cut its slate, having gone from…
Arriving at the Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia this year, I found myself witness to a brewing controversy. Deaf Lovers, a new film…
In William S. Burroughs’ novella Queer, Lee takes Allerton, the object of his all-consuming desire, to see Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. “In the dark theater,” Burroughs writes,…
Some movies are so bad that you stop watching them. Life is too short to endure consumerist rubbish that affronts art. Other movies are so…
In 1973’s The Day of The Jackal, adapted from the novel by Frederick Forsyth, an English assassin is hired by the Far Right OAS in…
The last image of Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, is one of the most heartbreaking in his long, storied, notorious, glorious, defining, essential career. It is of…
In his film adaptation of August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson, director Malcom Washington approaches his source material with both reverence and flexibility, providing space…
Grindhouse aficionados likely need no introduction to J. Michael Muro and Roy Frumkes’ 1987 splatter-fest Street Trash, a grungy cult-favorite about tainted liquor melting the…
Whenever a film critic, especially one who has probably only played a very limited number of games in their life, argues that a film is…
There’s a feeling most people will recognize, like leafing through a photo album you’ve seen a hundred times — the faces are familiar, the stories…
Way back in 2000, coming off a critical and box office slump that consumed most of the ’90s, Ridley Scott struck back with Gladiator. (It’s…
There’s a moment near the end of the first act of The Black Sea when Khalid (Derrick B. Harden), a Brooklynite stranded in the port…
Ever since making Dekalog in 1989, the monumental ten-hour-long Polish-language TV series consisting of one-hour episodes based on each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, director…
Eternity and ephemerality are frequently taken to be worlds apart, but they each belie a wistful attitude toward the enterprise of life. In Ghost Cat…