“We don’t want to scare people,” a director says at the beginning of Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man. It’s the set of a workplace…
All Shall Be Well opens with a leisurely, near-fantastical tour through what appears to be a typical 24 hours for Angie (Patra Au) and…
By now there’s little ground left to break within the Mockumentary genre, a fact only reinforced by Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight, a handsomely mounted…
It’s been almost 25 years since the infamous Esquire piece in which Andrew Sarris suggested that Kevin Smith might become “the next Scorsese.” One…
At first glance, it wouldn’t be unfair to view My Old Ass, the new feature from Canadian actress-turned-director Megan Park, as a bit of…
Since his debut feature, Tower, 12 years ago, Kazik Radwanski’s tendency to foreground his characters’ inner turmoil has been matched, and perhaps maintained, by…
Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) The Last Showgirl announces its intentions and approach from its first frame. We open on a tight shot of the…
Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that…
Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a…
Cinema certainly offers no shortly of coming-of-age films, yet very rarely do any of them rise above qualified praise to break the mold and…
Reagan, directed by Sean McNamara and based on the 2006 Paul Kengor book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, accounts for…
At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a…
The dying days of French colonial rule are given ironically youthful life in Robin Campillo’s Red Island. Set in the early 1970s in Madagascar,…
This critic has often compared Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon’s films to the work of Jacques Tati, but in their latest film, The Falling…
All the markers of a classic Coen Brothers’ crime comedy are there in Potsy Ponciroli’s Greedy People — the third film released this year…
Monica Sorelle’s feature debut, Mountains, is refreshingly simple. It follows demolition worker Xavier (Abiton Nazaire), a Haitian immigrant living in the Little Haiti neighborhood…
It’s not much of a revelation to suggest that Sundance has gradually moved away from its independent roots and transformed into something more akin…
The psychoanalytic term of the “big Other” is a fancy shorthand for our symbolic social order, and it’s what delimits most of our everyday…