“The most dangerous thing you can do in life is play it safe.” Though it would not be difficult to imagine, these words were not…
Those inclined to immediately exit the theater or press stop on their remotes the instant a film concludes would do well to take a beat…
There has been no shortage of Silent Night, Deadly Nights over the years. The original film, released in 1984, proudly wore its ax-toting Santa Claus…
In a moment in history increasingly submerged in a swill of irony and pessimism, James L. Brooks’ insistence on goodness feels like the last burst…
Adapted from Freida McFadden’s BookTok sensation and starring two of Hollywood’s most in-demand blonde actresses in Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried (both of whom also…
We’re back on Pandora, which according to multiple credible reports, still ain’t Kansas. 2022’s The Way of Water proved that James Cameron’s richly imagined and…
Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured a singer, a composer,…
“The voices on the phone are real.” So states the caption that appears on screen early in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab,…
Leave it to Gus Van Sant to find the homoeroticism in the Tony Kiritsis story. The man who wanted five million dollars and an apology…
Pedro Lemebel, the writer who chronicled Chilean queer life throughout the fall of the Pinochet regime, the rise of democracy, and the AIDS epidemic, proclaimed…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
A life’s linearity is only a biproduct of meticulously constructed narrative. In hindsight, things seem straightforward: clinging to your older sister’s pantlegs, you survive a…
There’s an overly edited, scored, and produced version of Sam Abbas’ Europe’s New Faces that would have taken the ongoing awards season by storm. Its…
Poverty and opulence, the pastoral and the high-tech, war and peace, childhood and adulthood. Opposite ends of a variety of spectrums meet, and sometimes clash,…
Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s last film, 2023’s Green Border, was a fact-based drama about migrants who were lured to Belarus by false promises of asylum,…
Of film history’s lost White Whales — the complete Magnificent Ambersons, for example, or The Day the Clown Cried — the eventual release of The…
Michael Showalter, in the past decade, has parlayed his success as a comedic writer and performer into a career as a writer-director of audience-pleasing dramedies…
Married directorial pair Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have consistently risked being hit by the type of criticism that considers “postmodernism” a dirty word. Many…
It’s not uncommon for an international film to obtain a different name in English-speaking markets, and that ends up being the case with Little Trouble…
A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies…