The decade-long collaboration between Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell has produced a fascinating cycle of films, including features and shorts, that goes some way in…
Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) The Last Showgirl announces its intentions and approach from its first frame. We open on a tight shot of the film’s…
Christopher Jason Bell has amassed an impressive filmography of shorts and features over the last 15 years, across which we can trace three key interests:…
No festival season rests complete without at least one recent opus by Filipino director Lav Diaz receiving due consideration, and Venice 2024 ensured this duty…
Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that the…
If, as the film’s logline suggests, we are to read the humble oyster as a “queer icon of New York City’s unlikely survival story,” then…
Clowning on Juggalos (see what I did there?) can sometimes feel like punching down. Their intense fandom, centered around the Detroit-based horror-rap group Insane Clown…
When HBO greenlit The Sopranos in 1997, nobody could have possibly foreseen the seismic influence and enduring cultural impact the show’s legacy would leave in…
On the surface, Dutch filmmaker Jan-Willem van Ewijk’s Alpha. falls into the trap set out by most contemporary European festival circuit films. It’s a movie…
The name most likely to catch the attention of cinephiles in the credits of Shahab Fotouhi’s first feature Boomerang is co-editor Aleksandre Koberidze, who broke…
The first thing you need to understand about The Deliverance is that said deliverance is different from an exorcism — no intercessor is needed. At…
For people of a certain age, author Joe R. Lansdale will likely always be best known as the writer of some of the best Jonah…
To its considerable credit, Stephen Soucy’s recent documentary, Merchant Ivory (2024), resists the tendency toward hagiography. It’s an understandably tempting opportunity, composed as the film…
Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a young…
Jeremy Saulnier’s new thriller Rebel Ridge doesn’t waste a moment of time getting wound up. Immediately, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre, in a terrific performance that…
Six years ago Zia Anger’s live cinema presentation My First Film (from which the film My First Film is adapted) sparked a fire around her…
Queen Elizabeth II’s love of horses is well known. She even made the trek to Kentucky five separate times during her reign to visit various…
In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels devoid…
In 2002, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to a storm of controversy, eclipsed — for better or worse —…
In the opening scene of Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, the film introduces one of its two heroines in a hospital clinic: a young Italian…