In some respects, the “officially sanctioned” of the SWYC Collective’s productions — it was scheduled for broadcast in China, before it was pulled by its…
Los Angeles Festival of Movies (LAFM) wrapped its third edition a couple weeks ago, and festival co-founders Micah Gottlieb and Sarah Winshall have made incremental…
Critic Filipe Furtado recently wrote a piece extolling the virtues of low-budget genre filmmaking, emphasizing how certain action specialists tend to compensate for a lack…
Early on in Francesco Sossai’s wistful, funny The Last One For The Road, a German tourist at a bar declares that he’s here to see…
Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body, a remake of violent Norwegian comedy The Trip, concerns a married couple (Jason Segel and Samara Weaving) who each…
Plenty of films have traversed the anxieties of separation and national identity, specifically the question of what happens when a nation breaks up from within,…
The trouble with effective satire is that sometimes the original mark already exists in such a heightened state that any attempts to ridicule, undermine, or…
Few manga adaptations are as alive as Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers. There are no bright, poppy explosions of color or wacky antics within…
There may not be a scientific definition of a “Sundance” movie, but Cole Webley’s debut feature Omaha could go some way to inscribing one into…
Successful parody requires affection. The reason why something like Young Frankenstein works – and—why anything directed by anyone named Friedberg and/or Seltzer categorically does not…
One of the biggest British hits when it was released in the country last year, I Swear has finally made its way to U.S. theaters.…
What a strange thing, the Olympics. In 1896, with the tools for globalization just barely on the horizon, the world (or, rather, Greece, leveraging its…
When a long-suppressed work of art finally surfaces, it generates unexpected conceptual ripples. We understand that the work was made in a particular time and…
It’s never easy admitting that you’re getting old. As we round the corner into the mid-2020s, an entire generation has to reckon with the idea…
No, it’s not the Brendan Fraser vehicle, nor is Boris Karloff back from the dead; Tom Cruise, mercifully, is nowhere to be found. An original…
In this dispatch: After Dreaming, Selegna…
It’s hard to do justice to the images in Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming through words alone. Their quality is of a blinkered, bleary kind, as…
At this point in film history, the city of Los Angeles has been photographed in absurdum. However, the particular neighborhoods in Anouk Moyaux’s Selegna Sol…
Can there be any reward for tolerance in an intolerant world? Fatih Akin’s Amrum opens with the arrival of German refugees to the titular German…
Two things can be true at once — a simple fact of life many folks still struggle to accept. Even with his reputation perpetually tarnished…
Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic, the final installment in the Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker’s Cairo trilogy following 2017’s The Nile Hilton Incident and 2022’s Cairo Conspiracy,…