Filmmaker Lucy Walker’s new documentary Bring Your Own Brigade is a large, unwieldy film, bursting at the seams with ideas. While occasionally unfocused, Walker deftly…
Procession Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for humanity. Certain films can truly change lives, as hyperbolic as that may sound. Robert…
Drive My Car is the latest proof that Ryusuke Hamaguchi is thinking much bigger than most of his contemporaries. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has fast become one of…
Procession is a work of communal catharsis, applying Greene’s particular documentarian inclinations to emotionally potent ends. Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for…
The First Wave isn’t much more than an ornamental object, pointlessly self-assured in its distasteful aesthetic manipulations. The compartmentalization that contemporary documentary tends to engender —…
House of Gucci is relentlessly entertaining spectacle, utterly soapy and only occasionally undermined by some bland prestige film sheen. Ridley Scott goes two-for-two this year, first…
The Strings is pure vibe-y lite-horror, director Ryan Glover skilled at eerie mood-setting and constructing effective compositions and ambiance. Ryan Glover’s new film The Strings is almost…
The Trouble with Being Born is remarkable not just for its futurism and ambient atmosphere, but for the care with which its relationships — not all…
From the outside, Peter Nicks’ documentaries follow in the path of Frederick Wiseman’s institutional portraits. Nicks’s first, second, and third films (The Waiting Room, The Force, Homeroom) correspond…
A recent episode of Saturday Night Live included the latest iteration of a recurring sketch, “The Dionne Warwick Talk Show,” which parodies Warwick’s latter-day pop-culture presence as…
It seems fair to suggest that The Forgotten Ones is a film for the Western Jews, communities of the diaspora, a collective lost to the Zionist campaign…
Burning Vividly illustrating Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” wildfires, which raged off and on from June 2019 into May 2020, Eva Orner’s new non-fiction film Burning…
C’mon C’mon is a distinctly inauthentic, contrived viewing experience more likely to have viewers chanting “go away, go away.” Next only to dead wives, doomed love…
Thy Kingdom Come feels like what it is — deleted scenes from (and a misapprehension of) To the Wonder rather than a supplement to its beauty.…
Black Friday comes loaded with potential, but ends up roughly as enjoyable as visiting a Wal-Mart on the titular holiday. Casey Tebo’s Black Friday, a horror-comedy…
Afterlife is more rehash than reinvention of the Ghostbusters brand, cloying and desperate in its mode of pure nostalgia. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is an almost purely nostalgic experience, but it…
I Was a Simple Man is a wildly contradictory affair, rife with unresolved ideas and a deluge a thematic material that find little purchase. “Maybe we…
Long Promised Road’s focus on Wilson’s present day adds dimension to his story, adding resonant beats to a beloved old tune. Brian Wilson, the singer-songwriter…
The Power of the Dog gains considerable power in its back half, but Campion ultimately leaves too much simply twist in the wind. The narrative of…
Prayers for the Stolen is blunt to the point of crassness and riddled with manipulative cliché. Making its way over to NYFF after picking up a…