The Cathedral After a series of accomplished shorts and one medium-length feature, the magnificently opaque Notes on an Appearance, Ricky D’Ambrose has returned with The…
Sundown finds Franco up to his usual tricks, offering some appeal in his refusal of convention, but little more. Sort of the self-styled bad boy of…
Nitrate Kisses opens with a lengthy quote by Adrienne Rich, stating that “whatever is unnamed will become […] not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.” The two…
Katz’s film is an understated, elliptical work that speaks volumes in its pointed quietude. Ana Katz’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet appears at first…
A Hero is Farhadi’s best work in a minute, still hampered by the director’s anonymous formal style, but otherwise delivering another masterful work of drama. Few…
The tame, backwards Sex Appeal has very little appeal indeed. New Hulu original Sex Appeal is tailor-made to be watched at sleepovers by undiscerning pretween girls looking…
Introduction bears a fitting title, as it feels like something distinctly new within Hong’s self-reflexive oeuvre. It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo, so…
The Last Thing Mary Saw is sedate bit of moody horror that takes an array of cinematic reference points and flattens them until there’s little…
Boy Harsher’s foray into filmmaking is a bit clunky, but The Runner certainly doesn’t lack for ambition or vibes. Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller have…
“This boy… and this girl… were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” So begins the dramatic voice-over of Nicholas Ray’s debut feature,…
Belle as a leaden mess of abject sentimentality and perfunctory technological tedium. If there’s anything to be gleaned from Belle, it’s this: Mamoru Hosoda has…
Italian Studies is a banal, ponderous work that fails to land on any interesting or governing thesis. Dislocation and dissociation lie at the heart of…
“A little more passion, though, would have been appreciated.” So says Dave Kehr of American — by way of London by way of France —…
The House isn’t quite a home, its neat little anthology package coming too much untied in a miscalculated final leg. The latest in Netflix’s endless stream…
Brazen is slickly made, but it’s otherwise firmly rooted in ’80s Lifetime thriller territory. As a title, Brazen sounds a little old-fashioned, a promise of titillation…
2022’s Scream is a sincere betrayal of the franchise’s legacy and devoid of Craven’s masterful craft and play. A rejoinder to a dead subgenre, Wes Craven’s 1996…
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 us…
An imperfect film, The Pink Cloud nonetheless stands as one of the defining pandemic texts despite — or perhaps because of — its predated genesis. Iuli Gerbase’s…
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 within…
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 Content…