In the year 2019 we have ourselves an honest-to-goodness, totally authentic film maudit, Brian De Palma’s new whatsit Domino. Barely completed, abandoned by its producers…
The Souvenir is that rare kind of great film, one that teaches you how to watch it as it goes on. There’s a constant tension…
For writer-director Terry Gilliam, a filmmaker who’s been ’tilting at windmills’ for most of his career, Miguel De Cervantes’s Don Quixote always seemed like an…
Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell is a ferocious film, built upon a mesmerizing, volcanic lead performance by Elizabeth Moss. Moss plays Becky Something, the aged lead singer…
Over his 30-plus year career, Mike Leigh has incisively observed human interactions and dissected the various factors (upbringing, education, religion, etc.) that define those relations. So…
“The closer you get, the further away it seems.” Claire Denis’s latest takes to space to articulate humans’ place in the cosmos, with a story that…
It feels pointed that the segment in Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s checkered timeline that forms its romantic core is set in the year 2000, which…
“What the fuck are you thinking?” a police chief asks dog groomer Marcello (a cartoonishly wide-eyed Marcello Fonte) about halfway through Dogman. He asks this question…
Under the Silver Lake, the third feature from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, is the kind of ambitious, self-indulgent project destined to appeal only to a…
Khalik Allah’s new essayistic documentary Black Mother is a deeply moving work of humanistic empathy, intertwining the personal and the political into an aesthetic that attempts…
If nothing else, Gaspar Noe’s Climax suggests that, should someone ever decide to revive the Step Up franchise, Noe might be a name producers could consider.…
Christian Petzold is one of our great contemporary dramatists, taking the building blocks of melodrama and draining them of artificiality; he’s a kind of quotidian,…
As one of the only Iranian films with traction and visibility on the international festival circuit, Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces has much to prove. The…
An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo’s bleak epic of lives spent swimming upstream in the modern economic conditions of China, is an exacting depiction of…
Shot on gorgeous 35mm, and in director Laszlo Nemes’s preferred close-up style (ported in from his debut feature, Son of Saul), and employing what appears…
Ash Is Purest White begins with the blaring of a bus horn — a sound which bears striking resemblance to another, heard at the end…
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi understands the nature of secrets and their revelations, that they rarely signal resolution and instead work to further complicate situations. Whenever…
At least for awhile, the new essay film by the pushing-90 French auteur Jean-Luc Godard plays like a liberally abridged version of his magnum opus, Histoire(s) du cinéma. The…
Two decades on now and Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become something of a genre unto himself. To those that concern themselves with film festivals and prestigey…
The first shot is a marvel — a quiet, lovely reverie that ends with a punch to the gut. As a young couple walk hand in…