Rock Bottom Riser is a work which regrettably shoehorns haptic political messaging into its otherwise incredible footage. Located somewhere in the Pacific Ocean — a body…
Huda’s Salon uses genre trappings as a pretext to gesture at loose connections to reality rather than meaningfully developing anything. The crucial difference between a…
Servants is a brutal, efficient affair, unconventional in its dramaturgy but landing with considerable force. Director Ivan Ostrochovský’s Servants begins with a cryptic, murky sequence…
Friends and Strangers has plenty on its mind and is expertly crafted, but it fails to fully coalesce into a cogent whole. Friends and Strangers,…
Ted K takes a potentially fascinating study and reduces it to a series of madman tropes and Wikipedia summarizing. The name Theodore Kaczynski has, for better…
Strawberry Mansion is a vision still worth experiencing, even as its muddled with an ill-considered screenplay rife with tired twee tropes. In 2017, Kentucker Audley and…
A Night of Knowing Nothing is a fascinating work of formal and intellectual hybridity. Beautifully dispatched through its entanglement of formal hybridity, Payal Kapadia’s A Night…
Playground is a penetrating, enveloping, and often brutal portrait of childhood. Playground, Laura Wandel’s first feature, is indeed set on an actual playground, but perhaps its…
Compartment No. 6 is a gentle, moving romance that understands the benefit of languor rather than compression in establishing human connection. Single lodgings in a two-seater…
Rifkin’s Festival isn’t necessarily major Allen, but it’s a light romp that exists at a fascinating nexus of the director’s career-long pursuits and predilections. There’s a…
There’s plenty of aesthetic polish to Futura, but it’s largely mitigated by the bland, reductive didacticism at its aging core. “How do you do, fellow…
Brighton 4th is but the latest example of festival-facing cinema slipping into anonymity under the weight of overly familiarly elements and arcs. There’s a scene midway…
Sundown finds Franco up to his usual tricks, offering some appeal in his refusal of convention, but little more. Sort of the self-styled bad boy of…
Italian Studies is a banal, ponderous work that fails to land on any interesting or governing thesis. Dislocation and dissociation lie at the heart of…
The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev’s debut feature The Whaler Boy takes us…
An imperfect film, The Pink Cloud nonetheless stands as one of the defining pandemic texts despite — or perhaps because of — its predated genesis. Iuli Gerbase’s…
Expedition Content takes to task the supremacy of the visual in film, delivering a vibrant, versatile work of experimental ethnography. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition Content…
Jockey has an undeniable soulfulness, but suffers from its overly familiar narrative shape and beats. While each individual film should be judged according to its own…
Poupelle of Chimney Town is appealingly bugnuts in bursts, but by the end, the Garbage Man isn’t the only thing here that stinks. At this…
Cyrano is a mess, a shambles, a misfire, and also one of the most enjoyable films of the year. The glut of awards bait that…