The mounting anxiety experienced by the protagonist of Petra Biondina Volpe’s Late Shift — Floria, a nurse on a badly understaffed surgical ward — hardly…
Stop me when you’ve heard this one before: Rose Byrne plays a frazzled, confrontational mom who feels that she’s constantly coming up short in supporting…
There’s an early scene in Amy Wang’s Slanted where our main character, Joan Huang (Shirley Chen), is shown scrolling through social media while wearing a clothespin fastened…
If you weren’t around to experience it in real time, it will be hard to grasp how seismic the 2002 FIFA World Cup feud between…
We need to talk about Tommy. In Jan Komasa’s Heel, Tommy (Anson Boon) is a proper hooligan. His nights out mean rails of cocaine in…
An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes…
The final act of Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy Blackberry — one of the best films of its year, and this half decade — opens with…
“Look at its body,” Melanie Griffith commands with a bawdy dip in vocal tone. The ‘80s icon, star of capitalist fable Working Girl and voyeuristic…
Moments in pop music come and go, but none in recent memory have been eulogized quite like brat summer. Within a year, the promotional tail…
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,…
It’s June 1993 in rural Nigeria. Remi and his younger brother Akin (real-life brothers Chibuike Marvelous Egbo and Godwin Egbo) are bickering, eating food and…
Maryam Touzani’s Calle Málaga won the Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival’s new Spotlight Section, and the film is accordingly an audience-pleaser. Following her…
The life of the tortured artist: society doesn’t understand them, friends and family abandon them, their audience doesn’t appreciate their work. From the artist’s perspective,…
Some day, our future will be someone else’s past. Arco, the titular co-protagonist of illustrator, comic book author, and short film director Ugo Bienvenu’s debut…
In 2014, Helen MacDonald released a memoir detailing the death of their beloved father, noted photojournalist Alisdair MacDonald, and their adoption of a goshawk as…
A tasteless trend in movie marketing to reveal titles one letter at a time transitioned seamlessly into movie-making at some point in the last decade…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, on October 7, 2023, opened the rhetorical floodgates on the wider population of the West’s awareness regarding the circumstances of the Israeli…
As director, writer, and co-leading actor of All That’s Left of You, Cherien Dabis would have taken on a significant artistic challenge no matter the…
It is tempting, in times like these, to ascribe to an archetype its particular incarnation, to historicize it one way or another. Such might be…