Kate isn’t doing anything new from an action-narrative perspective, but slick choreography and gleeful violence helps this girlboss brutality go down smoothly. Kate, a female…
TMBMZM oddly tilts toward authenticity rather than camp, to disappointing results. The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is a title that promises a lot. For…
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is famous for its portrayal of an inscrutable facial expression, that indelible half-smirk-half-smile that…
Striding Into the Wind One of the central tensions in cinema is that of authenticity: The inherent power of this medium comes from its depiction…
The Alpinist suffers a bit thanks due to a lack of access and more substantive commentary, but the frequent breathtaking feats captured are memorable enough…
Martyrs Lane is the latest horror film built around a metaphor for trauma in which boredom and cliche trump any catharsis. There’s a palpable sense…
Shinya Tsukamoto: unapologetic termite artist, jack of all cinematic trades — besides merely directing all of his feature-length freak shows, he also writes, produces, shoots,…
From a certain perspective, there are two types of Takashi Miike movies. The director has worked in more genres across a greater number of films…
They’re called “silent movies,” but for the most part, films preceding the advent of cinema sound recording weren’t really silent. Though there wasn’t on-screen dialog,…
Malaysia-born, Osaka-based director, and self-described “cinema drifter” Kah Wai Lim has previously made films in his native Malaysia, Hong Kong, Osaka, Croatia, and Slovenia, quietly…
Hiruko the Goblin Shinya Tsukamoto: unapologetic termite artist, jack of all cinematic trades — besides merely directing all of his feature-length freak shows, he also…
Fucking with Nobody is a radical, playful bit of meta-comedy that executes its risky conceit with aplomb. For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director…
Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller that grows in unsettling power across its runtime. Andreas Fontana’s Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller, carefully organizing a deceptively…
Diaz’s signature long-takes here work more to push the material into territory of fatalism rather than substantive political observation. Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s…
Dating abd New York offers sporadic pleasures, but can’t shake loose its obvious cribbing of familiar cinematic influences. Dating and New York, Jonah Feingold’s feature…
Language Lessons never quite becomes more than an acting exercise, but it’s still offers up intriguing questions about the disparity between online and offline personae. Among…
To put Maurice Pialat’s 1980 masterpiece Loulou into words is a deceptively challenging task. The premise seems simple: restless Parisian woman Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) is…
Memory House is little more than a mélange of affectations and overt symbolism, opaque for its own sake and succumbing to the worst arthouse pretenses. In…
Who You Think I Am attempts to speak to our current Internet age, but mines only shallowly with its picked-over storytelling mode. Juliette Binoche, for nearly…
Some pacing issues occasionally upset We Need to Do Something’s otherwise effective tone, but it remains a solid, low-ceiling genre exercise. We Need to Do…
Having first reached the festival circuit in December 2020 at the Cairo International Film Festival, the Mainland Chinese entry for competition at this year’s NYAFF…