John Woo is perhaps the greatest director of action films of the last 40 years; at the very least, the competition is quite slim. He…
Writer-director Fabián Hernández’s miserablist slice-of-life drama A Male concerns Carlos (Dylan Felipe Ramírez Espitia), a young teenager navigating the mean streets of Bogotá, Colombia. Left…
In Sean Price Williams’ directorial debut The Sweet East, Lillian (Talia Ryder) snaps to Ian (Jacob Elordi), “I believe that you’re more enamored in basking…
In This Issue: FEATURES: IT’S BACK: ADAPTATIONS OF STEPHEN KING’S HORROR EPIC by Mike Thorn FILM FESTIVAL COVERAGE: AFI FEST 2023, coverage by Andrew Dignan: American…
As the star of Hong Sang-soo has improbably grown, the traditional (and often erroneous) stereotypes lobbed against his films have stayed stuck in the mud.…
There’s much to like about Paris Zarcilla’s debut feature-length film, Raging Grace, a sorta-kinda horror movie that flirts with very familiar territory before eventually switching…
After a shamelessly nepotistic career reboot last year with Snipers, a high-profile blockbuster directed with (and seemingly largely by) her father Zhang Yimou, Zhang Mo…
Film adaptations of Stephen King’s work often suffer from genre misidentification. This isn’t to say that filmmakers mistakenly read King’s work as horror fiction —…
An easy bit of advice to give to any filmmaker who tries, whether with journalistic integrity or well-meaning folksy soapboxery, to make a film about…
As we enter the last release wave of true Covid films — those titles both produced during and concerned with the real-world crisis — first-time…
Stop me if this synopsis sounds familiar: A mousy young woman from an outlandishly dysfunctional family finally snaps and unleashes vengeance upon her small New…
When High and Low was released in 1963, Akira Kurosawa had been working his way through some of the world’s great literary works for quite…
Pedro Costa’s new eight-minute short film The Daughters of Fire is more daring, more formally complex, more beautiful than almost any other recent work one could…
The overwrought, overexplained, overedited maximalism of modern-day blockbuster cinema is a somewhat dumbed-down version of what film theorist Tom Gunning championed early, non-narrative silent cinema…
Uncropped In her 1977 essay collection On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that the abundance of photographic images in our culture had begun to engender “a…
Symbols are like Alfred Hitchcock’s (flawed) definition of drama — “life with the dull bits cut out.” Their universal appeal derives from prioritizing a familiar…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to the…
There’s no denying the contemporary trend to “narrativize” otherwise fact-based documentaries, filmmakers shaping reams of footage into something resembling the three-act structure of the average…
For most of Frederick Wiseman’s career, the master documentarian has focused on the lives and institutions of the United States. His films have painted a…
Ridley Scott is 85 years old and has directed, among other things, four feature films in the last five years, one of which was heavily…