Grief casts a long shadow. Aleem Khan’s After Love largely places itself in the darkness that comes before the hopeful ascent, drawing power from its…
In 1843, Karl Marx decided he would move away from Cologne to a land that would be more open to his ideas, more open in every…
A rare dramatic turn from Anna Kendrick, Alice, Darling surprises with its nuanced, twitchy lead performance. Alice (Kendrick) chooses to lie to her emotionally abusive…
While it never quite led to the promise of a more democratic cinematic landscape, there’s now an entire history of digital movie-making that exists both…
Film trailers sometimes embellish the truth, and other times overturn it entirely; Sony Pictures Classics’ preview of The Son, however, proves remarkably faithful to the…
In the commentary track to Grown-Ups (1980), one of eight television films Mike Leigh made for the BBC, the director remarks that many of his…
Li Xiaofeng’s Back to the Wharf begins with a tragic accident that escalates, shockingly, to murder. After high school student Song Hao (Zhou Zhengjie) stumbles…
Thanks to its quite odd pairing of collaborators, Sick is a movie awkwardly pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, you have…
From a certain angle, 2022 could be seen as the year of satire. There spectrum was vast, from the “high-brow,” like Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning…
It’s something of a fool’s errand to try to trace broad trends throughout a full festival lineup — most critics don’t see anywhere near the…
Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful Beings is a brutal yet abundantly tender coming-of-age tale that examines how intergenerational trauma mars the friendships that teenagers…
Premiering at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and dropping into U.S. theaters in the autumn, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO was a film that…
Shot on location in New Mexico in early 2021, Pete Ohs’ Jethica is a kind of minimalist sunbaked noir that gradually transforms into something altogether…
Even in the seemingly endless combinations and reconfigurations of tropes that make up horror B-movies, there occasionally needs to be some new input. Dusty old…
When Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses was released in 2003 (following numerous distribution delays by its original producer Universal Studios due to objectionable content),…
A woman stands in the courtroom witness box, her face tensed, pained, and withdrawn, her hands clasping the railing before her, while the judge’s questions…
The past invades the future in Paul Owens’ Landlocked, a low-budget, minimalist horror drama that’s steeped in the nostalgic haze of VHS grain and childhood…
“READ ME”: a visage lit in orange glow, hands, bodies, hands caressing bodies, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, the two words blinking mutely from a…
While the ongoing Liam Neeson dad-action-movie concern has been producing ever more diminishing returns, over the last decade and change, just about nobody has so…
Quoth Christine Choy, the Oscar-losing documentary filmmaker, notoriously candid NYU professor, and pseudo-subject of Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles: “You know, the thing…
What makes a great writer? Romantics and bookworms might wax poetic about unparalleled emotional insight or the fearless plumbing of the human condition, but pragmatists…