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…
There’s been a pandemic-level preponderance of hagiographic documentaries in the streaming era: David Beckham has one, Michelle Obama has one, Billy Joel got one just…
The name Duplass has become so synonymous with indie filmmaking, and Jay’s fingers (along with brother Mark) have found themselves in so many different pots,…
Much was made after the premiere of James Sweeney’s second feature, Twinless, of a steamy sex scene between his and Dylan O’Brien’s characters. Fans of…
What’s the worst thing that can come from a threesome? The storied history of cinematic threesomes and group sex rarely end well. Most often, relationships…
Leni Riefenstahl’s contribution to the evolution of film form cannot be overstated. It follows us like an apparition: look no further than Spielberg’s The Fabelmans…
Bing Liu ascribed a refreshingly unsentimental energy to the coming-of-age genre in his Oscar-nominated documentary, Minding the Gap. For his debut narrative feature, Preparation for…
Late in Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer, as army veteran Bill (David Strathairn) and his daughter-in-law Tammy (Jane Levy) visit an art gallery in their…