Aficionados of the Dog Movie will tell you that there are several distinct strains therein. You’ve got your broad comedies, usually involving a large and…
The concept of a Japanese ghost story conjures up many spectacular images of hauntings from throughout cinema history. There are the vengeful spirits of classic…
In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis radically upended the New College of Florida in an attempt to align the university with his party’s hyper-conservative ideologies,…
When people talk longingly about escaping to a deserted island, they probably don’t imagine forgoing human contact altogether. Peace and quiet is one thing; total…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
I recently had the good fortune to screen Macedonian writer-director Leon Ristov’s short film Nikola, Nikola, which had its World Premiere in June at the…
Behind-the-camera work can be thankless, especially if you’re a location scout. In The Scout, the debut feature from writer/director Paula González-Nasser, Sofia (Mimi Davila) lives…
The first 15 minutes of Take Off cite Hegel not once but twice. It goes without saying how unique this aspirational source is within the…
Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done begins with a cryptic series of images; pitch-black night, a pile of discarded clothing, closeups of various faces, impassive…
One of the earliest scenes in supernatural horror movie Never After Dark is of everyday familial intimacy — as a young woman drives along a…
In Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, grief bums around like a third wheel. It is needy, morose, fickle; the sort of guest that says they’re not…
Director Michael Dowse is no stranger to the rough-edged antihero, but perhaps he’s a bit less in touch with the management of thematic conciliation when…
Why are filmmakers today so afraid of melodrama? Many’s a recent feature, from the acclaimed (Celine Song’s Past Lives) to the less so (Luca Guadagnino’s…
Watching Resident Evil, I thought about choice, the force that presents differently in video games and video game adaptations. In the former, a spectator-player chooses…
Leonardo Pirondi’s debut feature Tropicais Fractais isn’t your conventional sci-fi epic. There is a spaceship, a futuristic bio-dome-like built environment, AI-powered supercomputers, and the impending…
Replacing Science Fiction and Fantasy, romance — colloquially specified as “smut” — has solidified as the dominant literary genre fare in the U.S. In a…
Catholicism and adolescence should, at least on paper, be natural bedfellows. One is a boundary-testing time of near-deranged horniness and rife with terrible decisions, whilst…
In this dispatch: Ink, Mr. Nelson, Did You…
“Fleet Flick From Fleet Street!” That could be the Sun headline for Danny Boyle’s boisterous adaptation of James Graham’s 2017 play about the transformation of…
The title of Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest foray into historical war drama comes from a question asked by a child to a Vietnam War veteran. Allen…
The dovetailing of a post-Free Solo film landscape with the advent of a mass production, streaming-focused documentary apparatus — exacerbated by the home-viewing requirements and…