The village schoolteacher, taciturn but possessed of intellectual passions, plays a newly delivered recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” for his class, most of whom…
Bollywood-sanctioned social-issue dramas — competently made, left-leaning rebuttals to some of the most incompetently made right-wing propagandist dramas — tend to prioritize fierce rebellion over…
Over the past century, Alexandre Dumas’ classic adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo has undergone literally dozens of film and television adaptations, finding a…
The key word in the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is “sorrows,” translated from the German Leiden, which really…
When Black September, a fringe militant offshoot of the Palestinian liberation movement, took 11 Israeli nationals hostage, murdering all of them within 24 hours along…
It’s a bit of a shame that Kaveh Daneshmand’s new film Endless Summer Syndrome comes to us in the wake of Catharine Breillat’s Last Summer.…
The Girl with the Needle, the third feature film by Swedish director Magnus von Horn, wastes no time in announcing to the viewer that it…
Whenever a film critic, especially one who has probably only played a very limited number of games in their life, argues that a film is…
There’s a moment near the end of the first act of The Black Sea when Khalid (Derrick B. Harden), a Brooklynite stranded in the port…
Eternity and ephemerality are frequently taken to be worlds apart, but they each belie a wistful attitude toward the enterprise of life. In Ghost Cat…
Humphrey Bogart was one of the most prolific and widely admired actors of the Hollywood studio system, and though he is still known for the…
“This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening…
Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s (L for Leisure, Two Plains & a Fancy) new film Dream Team boasts two assets not often paired together in…
Despite boasting one of the cringier on-the-nose titles of the year, one that on its face would seem to promise overt sentimentality, painter and installation…
Now with three feature films under his belt, Tyler Taormina has become our premier chronicler of a certain kind of suburban dreamscape — opaque, occasionally…
The perfect film for anyone who’s ever pondered the existence of a gift shop at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is consumed…
Lithuanian myths, folk songs, and hallucinations guide Deimantas Narkevičius’s film Twittering Soul. Set in the late 19th century before the Lumière Brothers began making films…
There’s a scene early on in Conclave, Edward Berger’s twisting, surprisingly pulpy thriller about the election of a new Pope, in which Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence…
Robin Wood begins the introduction to his 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films with a question: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” It’s a deceptively simple query; as…
Claymation, most readily identified for its craggy, almost comedic artificiality, can, in fact, most truthfully express our deepest and, at times, darkest emotions. The four…