Young filmmakers making gangster-adjacent genre films is a time-honored tradition — it’s a mode of moviemaking with a built-in propensity for ready-made conflict, violence, stylized…
“U.S. history is a branch of a larger tree of history… but it’s that covetous branch that thinks it’s the tree.” Proffered somewhere partway through…
There’s no denying the sheer aesthetic appeal of Laura McGann’s The Deepest Breath. Charting the mind-boggling freediving efforts of Alessia Zecchini and Stephen Keenan, the…
Savanah Leaf’s debut Earth Mama treats the viewer to a tender, moving portrait of a complicated Black woman. Leaf establishes the stakes early on: Gia…
Director Carolina Cavalli’s Italian import Amanda opens with the titular twenty-something protagonist attending a film screening alone on a Saturday night. Standing outside of the…
It might seem trite to begin a film review with a quote, but we live in a world of clichés and can only outrun our…
Anime has always been more inclined toward YA-facing and -reflecting projects than most other film genres, perhaps only rivaled by the short-lived post-Harry Potter cottage…
There’s been a recent trend of revisiting the makings of great Hollywood classics, and with her new documentary — Desperate Souls, Dark City and the…
Grief, guilt, and superstition slowly wreak havoc on the mind of a recent father, as he grapples with the death of a former lover. Seire,…
While technically a “Covid film,” shot on weekends with friends and family during the first wave of lockdowns in early 2020, Tyler Taormina’s Happer’s Comet…
Suicide narratives are dominated by two extremes: the undermined sense that all knowledge about the person who has died is now a hopelessly incomplete, even…
Users, Natalia Almada’s new essayistic documentary, is a text at war with itself, equal parts poetic rumination on the place of modern technology in our…
The challenge of representing larger-than-life figures is that it can be hard to fit them in frame. But what about figures who abstain from the…
There’s the kernel of a fascinating Frankenstein adaptation at the center of Bomani J. Story’s directorial debut, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. Taking…
David Lynch, a filmmaker with an oeuvre so inimitable and a style so recognizable that he is one of a handful of directors whose last…
One of the most harrowing legacies of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government had nothing to do with economics, labor unions, or privatization. Instead, Section 28 was…
Part coming-of-age tale, part ghost story, Charlotte Le Bon’s Falcon Lake stands out among its “teenager finds himself over the course of an idyllic summer…
With Past Lives, director Celine Song has a fine story on her hands — and she knows it. A decade after immigrating with her family…
The central message behind Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign in 1982 was this: if an individual could say no to drugs, there were other…
Elena Martín Gimeno is the director, co-writer, and star of Creatura, a somewhat oddly titled film. When Mila (Gimeno) and her partner find themselves unable…
In most movies, nature is portrayed as a still image, a landscape painting shown twenty-four times per second whose every detail is within God’s design.…