One of the primary pleasures of the film festival experience is encountering lower-profile new films and new creators free from the burdens of buzz or…
Mo McRae’s directorial debut A Lot of Nothing is — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — a satirical thriller about race relations…
There’s a furious call to revolution at the heart of Mariana Bastos’ Raquel 1:1, a sneaky-smart exploration of institutionalized misogyny masquerading as a vaguely “elevated”…
Timelessness is a crucial thing of nature — where sediments erode and seas dry, nature par excellence remains unchanged, a totality to reckon with, yet…
Panama is a muddled and befuddling film, offering a few choice Neveldine aesthetic choices but otherwise exhibiting a confused embrace of cliché. Intended as a temporary…
Windfall doesn’t have much depth but works quite well as a slick and playful noir trifle. Filmmaker Charlie McDowell has established a flair for filtering the…
Cheaper by the Dozen is successful at counting to 12 and basically nothing else. The Disney-Fox merger has been something of a boon for the House…
Black Crab is a mishmash of apocalyptic signifiers and sci-fi recency without ever establishing much of a core. The world has ended a few times over…
Întregalde is a humble, human-scaled story expertly told and sure to be one of the best films of the year. Radu Muntean might not be as well…
It’s easy to ride Love After Love’s opulent wave of aimlessness for a while, but it eventually all becomes too exhausting. Love After Love is…
There’s a piece of advice RuPaul often imparts to the drag queens competing on his hit reality TV show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, that essentially says…
Watching Joële Walinga’s new experimental found-footage documentary Self-Portrait, one is reminded of Abbas Kiarostami’s thoughts upon the Cannes premiere of his 2002 film Ten: “If…
Early Safdie producer and longtime Schulman/Joost collaborator Casey Neistat is more widely famous for his YouTube-based vlogs (subscribed to by 12.4 million individuals) and media…
2nd Chance Ramin Bahrani, once again, has something to say about the state of the modern-day American Dream. That “something,” per usual for him and…
Deep Water is an erotic thriller that’s neither particularly erotic nor thrilling. Those hoping for a horny throwback to the now-considered-classic erotic thrillers of the…
Alice is but another well-intentioned but utterly ham-fisted confrontation of America’s original sin. While history books are quick to tell us that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of…
By all accounts, Jane by Charlotte seems to be a therapeutic exercise, but for outside viewers, it’s a languidly paced and essentially shapeless film. Released in…
Bloody Oranges is late-’90s Tarantino knockoff adorned with finger-wagging political window dressing. Partway through alleged French comedy Bloody Oranges is an epigraph from Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (yes,…
Spin Me Round Jeff Baena’s Spin Me Round, co-written with its star Alison Brie, sets out as a comedic take on the very Hollywood idea…
The Outfit is a glossy but empty prestige crime drama that mistakes convolution for compelling plotting. Early in The Outfit, our central protagonist, a mild-mannered tailor…