The Rental is a serviceable if predictable thriller, but immediately situates Dave as the better director of the Franco brothers. Dave Franco must have taken a…
You Don’t Nomi is a clear-headed, surprisingly intelligent documentary with a lot more than lurid celebration on its mind. Jeffrey McHale’s documentary You Don’t Nomi takes…
MS Slavic 7 is an ambiguous, mechanistic work that seeks to understand the divide (and bridge) between passion and scholarship. Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s low-key,…
A director in tune with the material, and one willing to upset coming-of-age tropes, makes House of Hummingbird a surprising find. The feature directorial debut…
Aviva has the distinct feel a Personal™ film, and one that mistakes gimmickry for depth at every turn. Boaz Yakin has had a bizarre career,…
Overly reliant on metaphorical contrivance and signaled emotionality, Babyteeth fails to transcend its archetypal narrative. An unadorned tale of woe, grief, angst, love, mortality, and…
Miss Juneteenth is a delicate, gentle film arriving at a defining moment in American discourse surrounding race. Miss Juneteenth, the debut directorial feature of Channing Godfrey…
Yourself and Yours is a surreal, playful, and sometimes brilliant puzzle of a film from director Hong Sang-soo. In Yourself and Yours, we find Hong…
The unfortunate irony of Porno is that it fails to leave its audience satisfied. If you are naming your new indie horror flick Porno, you…
The Wolf House is a darkly magical fairy tale of arthouse cinema. To describe a film as magical may be a usually empty judgment, but…
Quentin Dupieux’s latest delivers the expected outlandishness but won’t live long in viewers’ memories. The life of a sociopath is laid bare in Quentin Dupieux’s macabre…
Valley Girl doesn’t live up to its namesake, but Jessica Rothe continues to engender good will. From the film’s earliest moments, as Alicia Silverstone appears…
Balagov’s debut proves a heady look at individualism, but one ultimately less substantive than it initially suggests. Tribal frictions unfurl, both combative and internalized, when…
Driveways feels like a relic from another era, an aughts-era indie drama already past its expiration date. An air of melancholy hangs heavy over Andrew…
The Trip to Greece continues the series’ trend of increasingly mature developments and proves a satisfying end. The Trip to Greece, purportedly the closing installment…
With Fourteen, Dan Sallit continues to prove his skill as a masterfully rhythmic writer and purveyor of low-key humanism. Audiences aren’t exactly suffering from a dearth…
Samurai Marathon, NYAFF’s opening night film, is a rather odd bird. It’s a Japanese jidaigeki period-piece from British director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Immortal Beloved) and…
Karim Moussaoui’s Until the Birds Return boasts a multi-narrative, ensemble structure, weaving between the lives of three modestly connected sets of characters. The film’s focus is on the subjects’…
In attempting to tackle topical material, Run This Town proves itself more part of the problem than the solution. Writer-director Ricky Tollman’s Run This Town purports…
Sorry We Missed You finds Ken Loach taking on the gig economy and the Sisyphean struggle it inflicts. For over fifty years now, Ken Loach has specialized in…
Extra Ordinary is a genuinely exciting debut that delivers a charming, standout comedic lead turn from Maeve Higgins. Writing-directing duo Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman and…