In his 1978 book Orientalism, historian and cultural critic Edward Said writes: “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not…
You Will Die at Twenty contains plenty of allegorical power, but its ineffectual plotting ultimately teases out more stimulating questions than it does answers. As a…
Run Hide Fight can go fuck itself. Any film critic worth their salt can speak to the near-impossible task of reviewing films in a true vacuum,…
American Skin is a smug, self-congratulatory vanity project that is sledgehammer-subtle and utterly depthless. Actor Nate Parker took the 2016 Sundance Film Festival by storm with…
Psycho Goreman offers undeniably impressive practical effects and exactly nothing else. In director Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman, two children — brother and sister — dig up…
Don’t Tell a Soul is an entertaining enough diversion than could have been so much more. There was always something slightly sinister lurking beneath the surface…
Breaking Fast is a delicate, charming, and welcomingly chaste love story that features an old-fashioned appeal. The marketing materials for the new queer comedy Breaking Fast…
Savage State is more fetish than flesh, settling for cyphers that vaguely reflect old Western classics. Although the Western may be long past its heyday, there…
Supernova is a restrained love story that manages to balance out the territory’s innate sentimentality. While actor-turned-director Harry Macqueen’s debut film Hinterland utilized the premise of…
Bloody Hell boasts obvious talent both behind and in front of the camera, but is belabored by its stale tics and tonal indecision. As film festivals…
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…
Film About a Father Who is an intimate, innovative auto-doc about wounded people finding solace in the company of fellow stragglers. Film About A Father Who…
Preparations is a major discovery, its distinct character recalling nothing less than the works of Abbas Kiarostami, Christian Petzold, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Preparations to Be Together…
In and Of Itself isn’t without its small hypocrisies, but ultimately surprises by delivering spectacle through its big heart and humanism. From 2016 to 2018, the…
Fernanda Valadez’s debut, while sometimes frustratingly broad, tells a well-known tale through unusual eyes, giving the classic immigration tale a welcome twist. Within a cinematic…
Rather than recalling Bahrani’s past strengths, The White Tiger only serves to draw out the director’s worst instincts. Filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has long focused on…
Our Friend upends some familiar conventions of the terminal illness narrative, but also boasts plenty of missed opportunities. One of the things that can only be…
Some of the most elegant and graceful tracking shots ever seen open Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor. They may be drone or helicopter-assisted; the camera, gravity-defying, soars over…
Notturno is at times oddly diffuse, but the harrowing brutality it captures bears undeniable power. The echoes of war reverberate throughout Notturno, a film of unnerving…
Atlantis is an unsettling, poignant study of the casual violence that both informs the past and estimates the future. With Atlantis, director Valentyn Vasyanovych (also editor…