In her 1977 essay collection On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that the abundance of photographic images in our culture had begun to engender “a chronic…
Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon: Part 2 – The Scargiver is less the conclusion to the director’s epic two-part techno-fantasy than a post-mortem. If it’s the…
Today we understand the university to be a uniquely reactive flashpoint for the major social, political, and generational battles defining the contemporary world. Yet in…
Many critics have already labeled Joanna Armow’s laboriously titled The Feeling That the Time For Doing Something Has Passed a “millennial” comedy (a fitting alternate…
It’s undeniably passé — and often critically fruitless — to note the difficult “art of adaptation” when it comes to translating literature for the screen,…
The lynchpin scene in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, an overheated yet deliciously entertaining sports drama, arrives around 30 minutes into the film and finds our three main…
One of the great “what ifs?” for filmgoers of a certain age is the now somewhat faded-from-memory Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn,…
Of all contemporary genres, horror seems the most susceptible to pastiche and the endless recycling of familiar tropes. Sequels and reboots are released at an…
With our own culture marginalized, when it isn’t being stripped for its most clean and convenient parts, queer people have often taken back from the…
Guy Ritchie has always been a bit of an aggressive but empty stylist. Right out of the gate with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,…
“That woman deserves her revenge and we deserve to die.” Twenty years and six months ago, Quentin Tarantino left audiences wanting blood. Well, even more…
Imtiaz Ali, classified as an auteur for skewering the conventional (in)sensibility of Bollywood’s melodramatic romances, is actually somewhat unclassifiable. He began his career in the…
The “gay bathhouse” comes from a rich and storied tradition, from 15th-century Florence to 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York City. Featuring an assortment of…
A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with Karl…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion magazine…
A pregnant woman nearing delivery self-pleasures by rubbing her privates against a bedpost. An attempted murder, in a flavor reminiscent of the book of Genesis,…
There are two films that writer-director Zarrar Kahn struggles to reconcile in his feature-length debut In Flames. The first, a domestic drama about women struggling…
With Yannick, filmmaker and absurdist Quentin Dupieux has synthesized the irreverent, a product of his usual gags and conceits, and the satirical, afforded by his…
Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim as…
Fewer subgenres in recent memory have had a more fleeting window of viability, if ever it even really existed, than the “pandemic film.” Beyond that,…