At it’s best, Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us manages to evoke Stephen King’s It. Based on Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, the…
Once the purview of Dateline NBC, 20/20, and 48 Hours, the surge of true-crime podcasts and Netflix documentaries has led to an explosion of amateur…
Marx’s vampires and specters; the oil crisis, Vietnam War, and industrializing slaughterhouses as the background for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the commodification of the spectacularly…
Zach Clark’s films embody so many of the inspiring qualities of great low-budget filmmaking: scrappy, rough-and-ready production values stretched to feel more expensive than they…
Both a post-#MeToo reckoning and a speculative account of the sort of behavior that could have transpired on billionaire Jeffrey Epstien’s island, Blink Twice —…
Last Saturday, August 17, the Locarno Film Festival ended and of the biggest name that was snubbed from the awards ceremony was Ramon Zürcher. At…
With 2024 marking the arrival of their eighth co-directed feature (with a couple additional co-director credits going to daughter Zelda in recent efforts), the projects…
Love Streams opens on Robert Harmon (director John Cassavetes), a washed-up novelist living in a nice, old house (the filmmaker’s actual home) interviewing some young…
Director Christoph Hochhäusler arrived on the international scene in the early aughts, as the film world began discovering a plethora of unique, formally inventive movies…
Before throwing us into the story proper, JT Mollner’s Strange Darling informs us that it was “shot entirely on 35mm film.” It’s a strange inclusion,…
The Seed of the Sacred Fig As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed…
In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First Reformed…
Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in a…
Belgian writer-director Claude Schmitz’s third feature, The Other Laurens, is a dry-humor thriller with an existential neo-noir façade. Viewers expecting a tense, philosophical slow-burn akin…
Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes opens to a beautiful autumnal scene of the French countryside in 1947: an old fictional mansion (called “Triste le Roy”)…
Pandemic films seem to arrive now with an amount of healthy attendant skepticism. Do we really want to keep reliving these moments of our lives?…
Writing about the recent Cuckoo, critic Willow Maclay asks: “does a film starring a trans person have a duty to say something specific about transness?”…
Monica Sorelle’s feature debut, Mountains, is refreshingly simple. It follows demolition worker Xavier (Abiton Nazaire), a Haitian immigrant living in the Little Haiti neighborhood of…
It feels pointless to aim for some new insight in regard to Magnificent Obsession. As the title suggests, Sirk’s melodramas, particularly those he made in…
It’s not much of a revelation to suggest that Sundance has gradually moved away from its independent roots and transformed into something more akin to…