We’re now quite a few years removed from Ari Folman’s critically hyped festival and awards season run for his animated documentary Waltz With Bashir —…
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) Bertrand Mandico’s new lo-fi whatsit After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is wildly ambitious, extremely beautiful, and maddeningly dull. In the film’s unspecified…
Walter Hill famously bristled at his film Southern Comfort being referred to as a Vietnam allegory; such denial has had him labeled as inexplicably stubborn,…
None of Mayday’s ideas are bold, and it presents its revolutionary possibilities as nothing more than mere daydream. At the beginning of Karen Cinnore’s Mayday, Ana,…
Dear Chantal After something of a breakout with last year’s delightful meta feature Fauna, Nicolás Pereda returns with Dear Chantal, a short created as part…
Birds of Paradise benefits from gorgeous compositions and dreamy direction, but it never quite reaches the heights its artful pirouetting suggests. On paper, Sarah Adina Smith’s…
Vika Kirchenbauer effectively established herself on the international experimental scene with her short Untitled Sequence of Gaps, from last year, an intriguing rumination on varieties of light…
Love Wolf boasts a bold formal idea that’s wielded to unfortunately perfunctory ends. Jonathan Ogilvie’s Lone Wolf, a political thriller told almost entirely through mock surveillance…
I’m Your Man has a clarity and vibrancy in its direction that isn’t achieved in its high-concept thematic concerns. Questions of humanity and love are pondered…
Multi-disciplinary artist Amalia Ulman finds exciting new means of express in her debut film effort El Planeta. This year, New Directors/New Films opens with Amalia…
Zhang Yimou’s One Second was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, but was pulled at the last, ahem, second for what…
The Eyes of Tammy Faye The rise of evangelism has had no small impact on the cultural and political dynamics of America today, having —…
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a reductive, self-congratulatory musical that deeply cheapens its real-life subject. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie…everybody, that is, except Amazon Studios, who have…
The Eyes of Tammy Faye indulges the very spectacle it supposedly interrogates, betraying its aims and offering only a flattened take on its titular subject. The…
The Rescue Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a knack for humanizing the most extreme situations and conditions on Earth. 2015’s Meru documented Chin’s…
After the resounding triumph of On Body and Soul, a film whose stoic tenderness and tactile intimacy proved an outlier among recent Golden Bear winners, Ildikó Enyedi returns…
Cry Macho is yet another late-career effort from Eastwood deconstructing his own legacy, neither his greatest such effort nor a throwaway piece. Just why does Clint…
Copshop finds Joe Carnahan at the top of his game, with the requisite violence, humor, and plot intricacies to sell this brand of genre bombast. Thanks…
Adapted from Stephen King’s slim debut novella, Brian De Palma’s Carrie is perhaps the quintessential modern witch narrative. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a bullied teenager…
Laurent Cantet stumbles badly with Arthur Rambo, a topical provocation on cancel culture and the evils of social media that feels both toothless and weirdly…