Ever since Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons has foregrounded the need for black adolescents to realize the importance of their influence and existence in a society fundamentally unjust…
Mati Diop’s debut feature Atlantics utilizes multiple narrative modes: social-realist drama, love story, detective procedural, ghost story, supernatural possession tale. And if the seams between these…
As the credits roll on Waves, against the blue, bright promise of an open sky, Alabama Shakes’s “Sound and Color” spills forth from the soundtrack.…
Religious resentment dominates the order of service in Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes, an adaptation of acclaimed screenwriter Anthony McCarten’s play about the unexpected resignation of…
The King At first glance, adapting a story about the seat of privilege that is the throne might seem like an unexpected move for Australian…
It’s nigh-impossible to discuss the new film In My Room, from Berlin School-affiliated writer/director Ulrich Köhler, without revealing that a third of the way in, seemingly…
The Lighthouse is, in some ways, the last film we need right now. A male-centric chamber piece, Robert Eggers’s latest revels in the grotesqueries of guydom: farts, hooch, and…
Ira Sachs’ Frankie is a film of bourgeois comforts. Set in summery Sintra, it offers any number of picturesque views of the Portuguese town, which…
Synonyms is a film driven by an idea, one that rattles around in its protagonist’s head and belabors him at every step. The question is one…
The corrupt progress of global capitalism is and has been an inevitability for the past half century, its footprint visible in the bruises mottling the…
Takashi Miike has never been one to play it safe. With over 100 films under his belt in a little over 28 years, you would…
Argentine director Mariano Llinás’s La Flor is a project ten years in the making, and an ode to the sort of movies that filmmakers once…
More sentient discourse than credible drama, Julius Onah’s Luce frankensteins together a collection of button-pushers: issues of race, class, privilege, elitism, tokenism, essentialism, free will,…
Radu Jude begins his magisterial I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians with actress Ioana Iacob introducing herself to the…
We may have gotten to the point where not only is A24 curating its brand with obvious aesthetic guidelines, but also, we have fresh filmmakers…
Carlos Reygadas, the provocateur of Japon and Battle in Heaven, seems to have finally matured. Some might argue that he took a step forward with Silent Light; others (me) would…
Jim Jarmusch’s new horror-comedy, The Dead Don’t Die, is a missive from the other side. For one thing, it’s a zombie film in the tradition…
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is over-directed: The camera impersonates the POV of a pop fly ball, the images frequently are affected by…
Ostensibly a return to the populist wuxia films of Chinese director Zhang Yimou‘s mid-2000s hayday, Shadow instead feels more like an exercise in extended foreplay.…
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s intimate epic of friendship between women, Happy Hour, was my favorite film of 2016, so needless to say Asako I & II, which…