My Donkey, My Lover & I might trade too liberally in cliché, but its escapist texture, palpable charm, and refusal to give in to sexist…
The Gray Man is an unforgivably bland and phoned-in actioner defined by digital smearing and toothless character work. It’s a little disingenuous to describe a $200…
The Mole Song: Final The Mole Song: Final is the third and, well, final part of Takashi Miike’s Mole Song series about an undercover cop…
A dark night of the soul that gradually metastasizes into a howl of impotent anger at life itself, Mitchell Stafiej’s The Diabetic follows 30-something Alek…
The Mole Song: Final is the third and, well, final part of Takashi Miike’s Mole Song series about an undercover cop infiltrating the yakuza. It…
Though its thematic threads begin to fray, Moloch remains a tantalizing evocation in primal fear that explores the allure behind myth and symbol. Idolatry has remained a…
The Killer is a shallow retread of already shallow ground and sunk by the blank slate of a “hero” at its core. As he did in…
Nope is undeniably ambitious and cribs from the best, but its determined obliqueness and prioritizing of subtext over genre thrills make for a rather sluggish affair.…
Shin Ultraman In 2016, mad genius Anno Hideaki took time off from his twenty-year-long project of remixing, remaking, revising, and reinterpreting his classic anime TV…
Edward Yang’s 1986 film Terrorizers is an opaque, elliptical portrait of overwhelming ennui in a then modern-day Taipei, and one of the earliest examples of…
Jeong Ga-young has spent the past several years carving out a space for herself on the fringes of the international festival circuit with films like…
Nounen Rena (Credited as Non) returns with her sophomore feature, writing, directing, and starring in Ribbon, a coming-of-age, Covid-set communion with the precipitate anxieties that…
Taiwanese-American filmmaker Arvin Chen’s previous two features, Au Revoir Taipei (2010) and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow (2013), are light, bubbly, visually vibrant variations…
The Wheel isn’t always a smooth ride, but it ultimately clicks into place in its affecting final stretch. When contemplating filmmakers who would attempt to…
Anything’s Possible is a well-intentioned film that is unfortunately undone by its shallow lip service and artless execution. Amazon’s new teen romance Anything’s Possible is…
There’s a wistful touch of George Bailey to the fatefully doomed protagonist of The Executioner (El Verdugo): José Luis is a Spanish undertaker yearning to…
Where the Crawdads Sing is a soggy, laughably self-serious mess that isn’t able to calibrate its particular wavelength of melodrama. Based on the wildly popular 2018…
Anonymous Club takes on a similar emotional shape to Barnett’s music, but largely fails to capture the same level of nuanced artistry. Danny Cohen’s Anonymous Club…
The Deer King is beautiful to look at and occasionally charming, but its underdeveloped plot gets in the way of any pleasures and makes for an…
Gone in the Night is a slog undone by its own structural conceit, confining its compelling material to flashbacks and riding a wave of dull inertia…