Beans offers good intentions and not much else, demonstrating neither the polish nor dramatic bona fides to pull off such a serious true-life treatment. It wouldn’t…
Unstuck in Time offers intimate portraiture of its subject without ever resorting to apologia or hagiography. In 1982, a young Robert B. Weide wrote to his…
She Paradise abandons the physicality at its core for an unfortunate bit of dubious messaging. Lost in the anonymous aesthetic swarm that is digital, independent filmmaking,…
Clerk plays out like a love letter from Smith to himself, not offering much for the rest of us involved in the film-watching process. For movie…
Dangerous is content to ride its plateaued production structure of cribbed parts to the territory of who cares. When speaking of Dangerous, it’s difficult to not make…
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…
Boiling Point resists the temptation toward food porn aestheticizing and instead builds a tightly-wound thriller from the anxiety of a working-class existence. Perhaps more so than…
Cusp is a frequently gorgeous doc that lights on some fascinating presentational modes and psychological insights, but which stumbles in last-minute bid for palliative punctuation. The…
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…