In the opening title scroll of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, the Brazil of 1977 the film takes place in is announced as “a…
“The year you were born,” reads the opening title card to Palestine 36. It’s a daunting prescription that also invites the viewer into the story.…
Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a sprawling, expansive work that functions simultaneously as familial remembrance, a documentary on Black intellectualism in the 20th and…
Rian Johnson brought the whodunnit into the 21st century, for better or worse. Knives Out revived it, imbuing the subgenre with the cozy vibes we…
In the 21st century, almost every film beyond a certain tax bracket is transnational in nature. Choose even a lower-budget indie film, ostensibly maintained in…
A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar…
With an education system as corrupt and ineffectual as that of the United States, stories of real teachers making a genuine difference are few and…
It’s June 1993 in rural Nigeria. Remi and his younger brother Akin (real-life brothers Chibuike Marvelous Egbo and Godwin Egbo) are bickering, eating food and…
2024 has shaped up to be a boon year for DIY cinema, with achievements like Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker emerging as critical…
Sincerity is dead at the movies, and this fall season has treated us to a preponderance of autopsies as proof — Bugonia, A House of…
Perhaps we’ve been sold an overly literal version of heaven when we jump at the chance to live forever. While theologians balk at how transactional…
When you love a director, you have to trust them, there’s no other way. That’s not the message of Casino — a quasi-biblical text about…
Sequel naming conventions can be a funny thing. The majority will opt for merely adding the next sequential numeral — Roman or otherwise — while…
YouTubers, TikTokers, and Letterboxd users made a major fuss over the desaturated color-grading of Jon M. Chu’s musical Wicked: Part One, turning its visual palette…
Silence — like its two unassuming allies, stillness and slowness — is often positioned as a response to mainstream cinema’s reckless noisiness. But contemporary indie…
Winter: the sun shyly hides behind a curtain of gray and makes its exit much earlier, but, when it does appear, it shines a special…
Of all the classics directed by Yasujirō Ozu, 1949’s Late Spring is not only the one that kickstarted his most fruitful creative period that would…
Follies If the sex comedy has become a rare breed in the two decades since its American Pie-to-Apatow heyday in the aughts, the marriage comedy, a…
Zodiac Killer Project is, put simply, a strange undertaking. Charlie Shackleton’s expansively stripped-down documentary emerged from a thwarted attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012…
Should war documentaries be fun? At the very least, we don’t expect them to be boring. It often feels like the whole genre is less…