Can the blatant artificiality of cinema fill the gaping void of reality? Acclaimed Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s resilient but consistently hurting Four Daughters asks…
The faux-retro affect of Alexander Payne’s new Vietnam-era film, The Holdovers, could never be mistaken for something genuine. Regardless of how it’s meant to be…
The oft-told story of the French-German dance-pop duo known as Milli Vanilli, comprising Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus, is a scandalous tale of exposed fraud…
Some types of horror are cosmic; others cautionary. In our day and age, when productions often come with a press kit full of themes, it’s…
Sofia Coppola has been chronicling the private spaces and inner lives of young women for her entire career and her new film Priscilla — an…
Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo Williams’ new film The Human Surge 3, which premiered this summer in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, is his first feature…
Michelangelo Antonioni’s endlessly digressive Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director’s first of four films produced outside his home country, features a particular digression that links it directly to…
In a small village in Jharkhand, east India prowls a tiger; this tiger is misogyny, and its fellow tigers constitute the broader institutions of patriarchy.…
Who owns America? The most cynical answer is likely the correct one: the highest bidders, the ones most willing to relinquish from themselves the Christian…
Godfrey Reggio is a filmmaker whose best-known work could be seen as a forerunner of the experimental documentary style that has become so widespread in…
A sobering reminder of the minefield the Internet can be for women, the documentary Another Body, from filmmakers Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, is perhaps…
Another week, another disposable Netflix feature that barely registers even as you’re watching it, seemingly designed to evaporate upon release (all the better to make…
It might be quite certain that the contemporary rom-com genre is far from its heyday. One simple and explicit reason for this is that most…
The suburban opioid crisis, like the war on terror and the ‘08 financial collapse before it, finally gets the smug “explainer video” treatment. After faintly…
An example of the laziness rife in digital filmmaking, Erige Sehiri’s Under the Fig Trees employs a haphazard handheld cinematography that echoes the immediacy of…
The main question asked in Errol Morris’ newest film — a presentation of late author John le Carré’s final interview — is not posed by…
Out of John Edward Williams’ three seminal novels — a trio of recently rediscovered bildungsromans about hapless young men who live uneventful lives (save for…
Writing in 1924, the rhetorician and literary critic I.A. Richards remarked, in his Principles of Literary Criticism, on the “futility of all argumentation that precedes…
The most revealing — in more ways than one — moment in Nyad, a biopic of the sixty-something marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, is a prolonged…
Blanket declarations about three-hour-plus runtimes always seem curious when filmmakers employ said length for wildly different purposes. Though the sweeping epic may be the most…