Pitched somewhere between the bone-dry absurdism of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama and the minimalist drone of Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos, Diego Mondaca’s Chaco refashions the war…
Between Dog and Wolf In Irene Gutiérrez’s Between Dog and Wolf, the relationship between past and present — and future — is vertiginous. We are…
Unlike Puiu’s similarly-shaped Sieranevada, Malmkrog is all empty abstraction, mistaking prattle for praxis. “For a talking cinema”: that’s the title that a young Maurice Scherer, not yet christened…
Thunder Force is yet another high-concept comedy collab between McCarthy and Falcone that fails at, well, being funny. On its surface, a film like Thunder…
Moffie is a visually striking film but one which suffers for failing to fully commit to the ugliness inherent to its narrative. Moffie is the…
Slalom is a raw and unpretentious study of trauma and the ways in which young women can wrest back control of their own course. The…
Held manages to best Cluff and Lofing’s The Gallows, but it still an abysmal, problematic, and tension-free failure. The new marriage-in-peril thriller Held comes courtesy…
“Movies don’t scare me” — said a straight-faced and stoical John Carpenter to Mick Garris in a 1982 television interview called “Fear on Film.” (Accompanying…
The Power doesn’t hold a lot of mystery but thrives by situating its political and cultural critiques as blunt, horrific text. There’s something sinister lurking…
Mamade Claude isn’t much more than shallow period dress-up and empty provocation. Set, for the most part, in the final tumultuous years of the Swinging…
Concrete Cowboy features a pair of solid performances and a sleek visual design, but suffers under the weight of its paint-by-numbers approach to narrative. Set…
Funny Face works as genre deconstruction and cinema of a certain geography, but its attempts at explicit commentary are less successful. Tim Sutton is a…
Under the guise of complacent nothingness, the characters of Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers manage to paradoxically enact and participate in sundry relationships, death drives, drug…
WeWork is somewhat limited in focus and doesn’t always plumb deeply, but remains an intermittently fascinating portrait of a conman and his grift. When applying…
When I was 22, my best friend and I lived together for a while in the apartment where I grew up. We were a twenty-minute…
Nina Wu’s early patience and promise unfortunately gives way to a more sensationalized, ill-conceived study of trauma. Hailed as Taiwan’s answer to the #MeToo movement…
This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is a remarkable debut, a tonally complex and visually sumptuous marvel. Existing in a kind of liminal…
The Unholy is a jump scare-centric, heavy-handed horror slog with little atmosphere and even less mystery. Keeping the good old-fashioned huckster spirit alive, Sony’s genre imprint…
Godzilla vs. Kong isn’t a perfect film, but it features franchise-best VFX and links to Toho-era entries in its commitment to visual spectacle over narrative.…
Every Breath You Take is a derivative, cliché-riddled yawn that would be more at home on late-night cable than on theater screens. While its title…