While the bibliographic career of Michel Houellebecq has never failed to court intrigue, praise, and rancor, his filmed performances have garnered relatively little attention.…
Favoriten (2024), Ruth Beckermann’s latest, rolls production titles over a series of children’s drawings of buildings. Following a nigh universal youthful design scheme, the…
Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes begins with a corker of an opening shot. Predominantly taking place at adjoining apartment complexes in Marseille separated by a courtyard, the…
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…
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…
The Alex Honnold we met in 2020’s Free Solo is no longer, apparently. Once a laser-focused, emotionally-detached athlete honed in on his solitary conquests…
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;…
Wang Bing films have a reputation for their difficulty, but the opening film in his Youth trilogy, Youth (Spring), managed to be surprisingly varied…
Director Mikio Naruse never garnered the acclaim of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Akira Kurosawa. The absence of a clearly legible “minimalism” (a reductive…
Claymation, most readily identified for its craggy, almost comedic artificiality, can, in fact, most truthfully express our deepest and, at times, darkest emotions. The…
Rap World, the longest film directed by Conner O’Malley to date (running just a smidge over 55 minutes), is somewhat contradictorily one of his…
A smog of displacement and destiny envelops the opening minutes of La Cocina. As a homeless man on the streets of Manhattan waxes poetic…
Filmgoers, and genre fans more specifically, know that it’s hard to mess up those little two-handers about a killer in an isolated space cat-and-mousing…
Remember the first Venom movie? No, not Spider-Man 3, but the 2018 project with Tom Hardy that somehow still seems like it came out…
Among cinephiles, Guy Maddin has long reigned with the celebration and consolation of being “the most accessible avant-gardist.” Since breaking out of obscurity with…
Darla Peterson’s life is a mess. She works dead-end jobs, her latest startup, Kitty Kaskets, has flopped, and now she owes the IRS $349,000.…
In our modern world, love and cynicism often seem to dance in a delicate balance. In an age where skepticism frequently overshadows sincerity, it’s…
Our multiplexes and home theaters desperately miss the erotic thriller. Every few years, one or two squeaky clean PG-13 studio productions will don the…