The Batman is an entirely overlong and overextended affair, but otherwise delivers gorgeous imagery, thoughtful mythos, and playfully brooding emo inflection. The Dark Knight is moodier…
Rock Bottom Riser is a work which regrettably shoehorns haptic political messaging into its otherwise incredible footage. Located somewhere in the Pacific Ocean — a body…
Huda’s Salon uses genre trappings as a pretext to gesture at loose connections to reality rather than meaningfully developing anything. The crucial difference between a…
If one were to name the auteur who most avidly committed to the integrity of mise-en-scène and who was always truly passionate in polemical defenses…
Servants is a brutal, efficient affair, unconventional in its dramaturgy but landing with considerable force. Director Ivan Ostrochovský’s Servants begins with a cryptic, murky sequence…
The Desperate Hour is such a shrug of a film that it isn’t even worth considering the potentially offensive exploitation of its conceit. With The…
Butter is an irresponsible, wholly offensive exploitation of serious mental illness concerns. On its surface, new teen dramedy Butter seems like the kind of film…
Ghosts of the Ozarks tees up a potentially fascinating horror-western premise, but much of its appeal dissipates as its back half becomes frustratingly obvious. There’s…
Poly Styrene doesn’t do much formally, but its personal stakes and unflinching candor still manage to resonate. Making a documentary about any icon is a…
Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop rides its quaint aesthetic all the way to feeling already dated. On paper, Brad Watson’s Miss Willoughby and the…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or…
Potato Dreams of America is an uneven, arrhythmic effort that undermines its early promise with a blunted second half. If Marvel’s Wandavision has left you…
Tsui Hark presents something of a glorious contradiction, the kind that nevertheless hewed closely to the norm in the crazed grandeur of Hong Kong during…
Cinephiles of a certain breed are going to find a lot to like about Jakko (Petri Poikolainen), the smart-ass protagonist of the Finnish import The…
Lois Patiño is one of the most experimental figures among the burgeoning Catalan scene. His concerns tend to be painterly, usually affording pride of place…
Lucrecia Martel is one of our great contemporary filmmakers, so much so that even a modestly scaled, short work like Terminal Norte demands some attention.…
French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis has been working on a film about Thelonious Monk for more than a decade. Rewind and Play is not that movie.…
The Novelist’s Film One of the most pleasurable ways to engage with a Hong Sang-soo film is to consider the similarities and differences between each…
Friends and Strangers has plenty on its mind and is expertly crafted, but it fails to fully coalesce into a cogent whole. Friends and Strangers,…
From its title alone, Gastón Solnicki’s latest film suggests that it avoids grand statements, instead choosing to offer an assemblage of conceptual lagniappes, ideational odds…