It’s perhaps too easy to dismiss a film as heavily aestheticized and intentionally non-narrative as Jonathan Rosado’s Matador Bolero for prioritizing style over substance. The…
The debut feature from Spanish director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias is a different kind of coming-of-age story, one that finds its young protagonist Cata (Zoe Stein)…
Canadian animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière has described his third and most ambitious feature, film Death Does Not Exist, as a tonal experiment, dropping characters possessed with…
Writer-director Boots Riley serves a vital role in the world of pop filmmaking, and that sentiment is not at all diluted by the fact that…
At the start of Manas, Tielle’s world seems boundless, idyllic. Tielle, short for Marcielle, is a 13-year-old girl played with astounding maturity by Jamilli Correa.…
Ah, another installment in the Times Square chronicles for this critic, and this time, a film truly worthy of such an environment — meaning, it’s…
Passenger starts with a prayer. “Carry me safely to my destined place, like you carried Christ in your close embrace,” ends the prayer to St.…
In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13,…
When a documentary’s primary source material and subject of inquiry is revealed to be vlog content, YouTube channels, and other ephemera of pre- and early-aughts…
For the first time in seven years, there’s a new Star Wars movie in theaters, and somehow it’s up for debate if anyone actually cares…
Maddening as it is that the middlebrow (leaning low) fodder of yesteryear continues to serve as a lightning rod for conservative megacorporations eager to cash…
The gifted prodigy who’s gone to seed is a time-honored trope that will never leave us because it flatters both filmmakers and actors. A streetwise…
Saccharine was inevitable. In the Western world, there’s never been a worse time to have a body. Navigating the Internet is an exercise in polarity…
To fully appreciate — or even comprehend — a project like Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe would require extensive foreknowledge of…
From a certain point of view, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War is emblematic of the state of modern filmmaking. For one thing, a resurgence…
Centered in a sepia-toned frame, two young, Black girls sit on a park bench, their backs to the camera. Another child passing by smears one…
A monkey’s paw-inspired horror film that’s not-so-secretly about the loss of free will and specifically women being subjugated by their partners, Obsession — from 26-year-old…
Not Arthur Rimbaud, but A. Rimbaud. The title of Patrick Wang’s latest film is the skeleton key that unlocks the principles behind its approach to…
When Affection opens, our protagonist (Jessica Rothe) is facedown on a road. It would appear she’s been in a car wreck. She stands up, stumbles…
If you’re trying to escape from Anywhere, perhaps the only alternative is… nowhere. This is the agonizing reality that director Alberto Vázquez (Birdboy, Unicorn Wars)…
Only one month after The Christophers opened in theaters, we have been gifted another film about art forgery in the form of Jing Ai Ng’s…