“People are cheap, water is expensive.” So says Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the mysterious and curiously educated drifter who stumbles into Ali’s (Ekin Koç) withered…
If you follow the news or perhaps live in one of the American cities where masked thugs are abducting people off the streets, having its…
Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk seems likely to be the most important film to screen at the 2025…
In the television series Dexter, our eponymous antagonist finds himself gifted, or cursed, with an insatiable urge to kill. Although he grows up under the…
Justin Lin, once at the helm of the Fast & Furious franchise — including entries four through six, as well as two and nine —…
Jan Komasa’s Anniversary is an ungainly thing, a handsomely mounted prestige drama that appears at first to be a kind of “how we live now”…
Perhaps more well-known as a former Cahiers du Cinéma critic and the frequent co-screenwriter with the likes of Jacques Rivette, André Techiné, and Chantal Akerman,…
Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert is a sort of un-Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall: everyone at the Sex Pistols concert in 1976 started…
Critiquing the directorial efforts of well-known actors is trickier than it seems. For example, it’s impossible to ignore, especially at a festival as prestigious and…
The ceiling caves in at the outset of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the Rose Byrne-starring second feature from Mary Bronstein, her first…
Göran Olsson’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 is a remarkable documentary, if not purely for its access to decades worth of newsreels, interviews, and…
“Why do you want to dance?” a character asks Moira Shearer’s aspiring ballerina in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. “Why do you want to…
Whatever else you can say about Nico Ballesteros’ fascinating and frustrating In Whose Name?, it doesn’t make too many excuses for the downfall of Kanye…
Few things are capable of riling almost everyone up collectively, and those that do typically pivot toward unambiguous moral spectacle. In the hyper-mediated 21st century,…
Grieving in cinema — often perceived as the most painful remembrance of someone whose body you can no longer possess, but whose soul (consciousness, if…
Writer-director Carmen Emmi, inspired in part by a 2016 L.A. Times article detailing a sting operation by undercover police officers at a popular cruising site…
The Cannes Film Festival has a reputation (not entirely undeserved) for skewing its selections toward the more abstruse, audience-unfriendly end of the international cinema spectrum.…
Megalopolis. It’s the movie that just won’t die. Whatever one’s take on it upon release, and the takes were legion, Francis Ford Coppola has kept…
Unlike the two other entries in Dag Johan Haugerud’s thematically linked Love-Sex-Dreams trilogy, Dreams is not concerned with steadily paced dialogues or mature perspectives. While…
The History of Sound, from director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck, was met with a somewhat chilly critical reception at the 2025 Cannes Film…