Prior to the premiere of The Old Oak at Cannes back in May, Ken Loach indicated that this would be his last feature film. Granted,…
Death hangs over Jeff Rutherford’s keenly observed and poignant feature debut, A Perfect Day for Caribou. We meet Herman (Jeb Barrier), a scruffy, world-weary man…
In an interview with Michael Haneke about 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the final part of the director’s then lesser-known Glaciation Trilogy (1989 – 1994),…
“You are a baby man.” Less an insult than an observation, these words spoken to Lousy Carter (David Krumholtz) by his ex Candela (Olivia Thirlby)…
Steve Buscemi’s directorial efforts have tended to focus on outsiders and castoffs. In his 1996 debut, Trees Lounge, the hopeless and downhearted congregate at a…
With 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, director Adam Wingard became one of the few Western filmmakers to realize that the kaiju movie is more a graphic…
A man living by himself in a small, ramshackle house. A knock at the door. A stranger asking for help who may or may not…
At the height of the pandemic, one of the more uplifting trends on social media were videos of people living in cities, clanging pots and…
In an edition of surprises, programming eclecticism, and a refreshingly measured jury performance, Nicolas Philibert’s Golden Bear win for his latest documentary might yet prove…
Slackers have been the bread and butter of indie cinema since 90’s mainstays like Clerks and Slacker helped jumpstart the whole modern American independent film…
In a sea of forgettable, workman-like mediocrity, let us appreciate Luc Besson’s DogMan for being something of a rarity: an honest-to-goodness fiasco born of a…
A woman speaks French as the top third of the image reveals itself to the audience, the rest of the screen blank. A man in…
“Toys are too preoccupied with fun,” Alejandro (Julio Torres) declares in a cover letter to Hasbro during the opening of Torres’ debut feature film Problemista.…
Where do irony and sincerity stand today, both with respect to each other and to the cultural scene at large? A litmus test for endorsing…
Hollywood film scholar Thomas Schatz’s essay “Film Genre and the Genre Film” describes our relationship with the film genre as both static and dynamic. The…
Russell Crowe plays ex-cop Roy Freeman in the mystery thriller Sleeping Dogs, a film that feels like it was made dispassionately by a committee of…
With so much modern horror based in ’80s VHS nostalgia or mired in transmuting trauma, it’s enough that Late Night with the Devil’s set of…
Rowdy Herrington’s 1989 opus Road House is, in the unironic view of this writer, a bona fide classic and one of the best American films…
How old were you when you recognized that the villain of Ivan Reitman’s original Ghostbusters was the Environmental Protection Agency? Obviously, it’s the text of…
Joe McNally says he still sees things through nine-year-old eyes — eyes that, now in their late-’50s, once witnessed the murder of his teenage uncle…
Despite the desperate urgency of the film’s subject matter, Virpi Suutari’s Once Upon a Time in a Forest takes its time. Lush and languid encounters…