It’s overselling Mayday a bit to suggest that it could have been made and released in 1987, when it takes place. That said, it’s rather…
There aren’t enough filmmakers, perhaps, still afraid of Virginia Woolf. Tina Gharavi, whose film I Am Nasrine was smuggled out of Tehran before being nominated…
Before beginning production on Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock invited screenwriter Arthur Laurents to dinner with his wife Alma. The film’s star, Farley Granger, with whom…
There’s a category of media that takes juvenile gleefulness in tarnishing comforting and wholesome nostalgic imagery with violence, sex, and existential darkness. Early internet games…
Whether she was shooting her sexual experiences with lovers, the social and political climate of cultural feminism, or an ultimately fatal battle with ovarian cancer,…
With an education system as corrupt and ineffectual as that of the United States, stories of real teachers making a genuine difference are few and…
Even when Jorge Luis Borges wrote screenplays, they weren’t necessarily “Borgesian” — not, that is, distilled into the particular pleasure of following one of Borges’…
“Consequently, Twenty-Four Eyes, which was made by Kinoshita Keisuke in 1954, is clearly a Japanese film,” says Nagisa Oshima, “but the Twenty-Four Eyes made in…
Coyote vs. Acme’s journey from Warner Bros. tax write-off to Ketchup Entertainment theatrical release is well-documented. What the three-year-plus saga illuminated, more than anything, is…
The sitcom was never meant to be real; its unreality was its greatest attraction, peering back through the façades of modern suburbanity at an audience…
Adapted from Peter Heller’s novel of the same name, The Dog Stars is set in a world that’s been decimated by a global pandemic that…
Mumblecore never went away. Arguably the most influential movement in American cinema during the 21st century, it birthed careers for Mark and Jay Duplass, Greta…
Writing about Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, critic Ali Karimnia observes that it is “a cinema that, rather than telling us what the world is,…
After Latvia became the first Baltic country to win an Academy Award with Flow in 2025, Conan O’Brien joked, “Ball’s in your court, Estonia!” The…
The Russo brothers are now a brand unto themselves. Whether helming as directors or solely producing, there’s a certain “offensively inoffensive” blandness that has characterized…
Let’s imagine for a second the the potential recent states of mind of Wagner Moura and Greta Lee. Both are relatively fresh off some enormous…
It’s a sign of great writing when you can identify everything you love and hate about a character, but can’t decide whether you love or…
The verdant hills of a resort’s private golf course serve as the backdrop for Rafael Manuel’s debut feature, Filipiñana; a strikingly picturesque setting that is…
Macon Blair’s new film arrives with the title Idiots, but it began life, and even premiered, under the name The Shitheads. That any semblance of…
Marianne Elliott is an extraordinary theater director. Modernist and (tastefully) ostentatious in her staging, she never loses sight of the soft, squishy human heart at…
Rafael Manuel’s debut feature Filipiñana should go down as one of this decade’s great sweaty films. The humidity of its Philippines setting is touched with…