Slow, Marija Kavtaradzė’s second feature film, finds solace in the physicality that builds a world around its audience. The opening moments find a man mounting…
The objective of any piece of art is to make us realize that the world is bigger than the inside of our own head. The…
It’s a family affair in Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat, with the actor-turned-writer-director building the film around his daughter Maya Hawke’s performance as Southern Gothic author Flannery…
In a 2020 essay by David Farrier, written at the very beginning of Covid lockdowns, the writer quotes Arundhati Roy, who calls the pandemic “a…
In 2000, Swedish director Roy Andersson premiered a film entitled Songs From the Second Floor. In a series of stationary camera set-ups, the film shows…
Today we understand the university to be a uniquely reactive flashpoint for the major social, political, and generational battles defining the contemporary world. Yet in…
It’s undeniably passé — and often critically fruitless — to note the difficult “art of adaptation” when it comes to translating literature for the screen,…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion magazine…
A pregnant woman nearing delivery self-pleasures by rubbing her privates against a bedpost. An attempted murder, in a flavor reminiscent of the book of Genesis,…
Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim as…
Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji’s feature directorial debut, Omen, is a promising if not confident fable. Koffi (Mark Zinga) and Alice (Lucie Debay) return home to the…
At first blush (and the next few, for that matter), actress Brittany Snow’s directorial debut, Parachute, which premiered in the Narrative Feature Competition at the…
“You are a baby man.” Less an insult than an observation, these words spoken to Lousy Carter (David Krumholtz) by his ex Candela (Olivia Thirlby)…
Steve Buscemi’s directorial efforts have tended to focus on outsiders and castoffs. In his 1996 debut, Trees Lounge, the hopeless and downhearted congregate at a…
“Toys are too preoccupied with fun,” Alejandro (Julio Torres) declares in a cover letter to Hasbro during the opening of Torres’ debut feature film Problemista.…
Hollywood film scholar Thomas Schatz’s essay “Film Genre and the Genre Film” describes our relationship with the film genre as both static and dynamic. The…
Part of a generation of First Nations filmmakers that also includes Rachel Perkins (Radiance, Bran Nue Dae), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country, The…
Chinese-Korean director Zhang Lu has been a bit of a slow burn in the West. Despite having directed 12 feature films since 2003, only a…
Writing about Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is a challenge, not least because of its stark minimalism. I can’t recall a concert film as ascetically committed…
Almost every program description or review of Alison O’Daniel’s first feature, The Tuba Thieves, including now this one, begins by noting that it is largely…