The Whaler Boy undermines any potential for naturalism and rawness with slick artifice and discordant commercial style. Philipp Yuryev’s debut feature The Whaler Boy takes…
An imperfect film, The Pink Cloud nonetheless stands as one of the defining pandemic texts despite — or perhaps because of — its predated genesis. Iuli…
Shattered is a sleazy erotic thriller knockoff, one that never realizes its camp potential but which boasts a few poor-taste pleasures along the way. Hidden…
Expedition Content takes to task the supremacy of the visual in film, delivering a vibrant, versatile work of experimental ethnography. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition…
Woodlands Dark is exceedingly thoughtful and never less than riveting despite its length, a film destined to become an important work of criticism. In…
Calling Tsai Ming-liang’s body of work interconnected doesn’t begin to cover the throughlines that have developed over the span of more than three decades.…
Honorable Mention: Licorice Pizza is, like almost every other Paul Thomas Anderson movie, about America. More specifically it is about America as embodied in…
Honorable Mention: After the WWII-set Phoenix (a production so emotionally taxing it seems to have severed the relationship between the director and his long-time…
Honorable Mention: A quick glimpse at the one-sheet for Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon doesn’t inspire much hope. A black-and-white flick with both auto- and…
Honorable Mention: It’s Christmas, the time of miracles, and there’s been no greater cinematic miracle this holiday/award season than the fact that Paul Verhoeven…
Honorable Mention: Leave it to Sean Baker to direct poverty porn. After the much-celebrated The Florida Project, a fantastical if somewhat aestheticised survey of…
#21. Hong Sang-soo’s films generally fall somewhere between melodrama and farce, but to classify them as such is to no doubt essentialize them as…
#22. James Wan’s 40-million-dollar check, signed and sealed by a grateful Warner Bros. in recompense for the success of Aquaman, enables a continuation of his…
#23. After a gap between series entries wide enough to accommodate a live-action Godzilla flick, Hideaki Anno concluded his long-running mecha anime Neon Genesis…
#24. Siberia flaunts Abel Ferrara’s enthralling and fearless devotion to a uniquely dynamic (and specifically filmic) form of psychological expressionism — an approach that is…
#25. “Say like The Black Album was like The Black Movie. So the soundtracks are like scores to scenes that’s going on in the movie.…
#16. The burden of tradition makes itself felt throughout Chaitanya Tamhane’s sophomore feature, The Disciple. The story template is familiar: that of a striving artist…
#17. On its surface an ode to disappearing print journalism and the power of a good editor, The French Dispatch finds Wes Anderson using…