The Prom doesn’t offer much in the way of insight or novelty, but its glitz-and-glitter styling is a welcome confection at the end of 2020. Ryan…
Farewell Amor resembles, in shape, less accomplished recent indie efforts, but it eschews much of their patness in creating something altogether more complex and affecting. From…
Alex Wheatle is the slightest of the Small Axe films in many ways, but it’s also perhaps the most instructive as to the project’s overarching concerns. Having left…
Wild Mountain Thyme is a hurried, generic The Quiet Man-Hallmark fairy tale mashup, with all the mess and none of the fun that description suggests. From the…
ON-GAKU: Our Sound is something of a strange contradiction, managing both stupidity and profundity in equal measure. Kenji Iwaisawa was able to accomplish something few in…
Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine thankfully manages to avoid status quo filmmaking but still feels somehow unfinished. There seems to be a…
The Mole Agent’s overly complicated setup and unnecessary dramatic flair detract from what could have made the film great — the real people. The Mole…
Identifying Features Within a cinematic tradition that associates the violence of Mexico’s crime-infested northern border with the high-stakes machismo of drug cartels and CIA spies,…
To the Ends of the Earth is a masterwork of adventurous, boundary-less filmmaking. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film…
There is potential potency to the character work in A Family Tour, but the flat direction renders nearly every scene frustratingly inert. There’s no shortage…
Archenemy nicely compensates for its budget with some bits of visual aplomb, but it amounts to little as the film frustratingly spends most of its time…
The New Directors/New Films festival has emerged in recent years as a major player on the festival scene, programming such diverse heavy-hitters as Black Mother, An…
To the casual observer, viewing someone else’s relationship from the outside, there often appears to be a sense of unity, cohesion of the somatic and…
Detention recommends director John Hsu’s future efforts, but this debut effort falls mostly short of the mark. John Hsu’s debut feature Detention isn’t so much a…
All My Life adopts the familiar form of any number of tragic romances without building any depth into its vision. Jessica Rothe is undoubtedly one of…
76 Days’ rhythms are occasionally uneven, but it remains a fascinating glimpse at one of the defining crises of our times. There’s a harrowing sense…
Red, White and Blue is incisive and deeply felt, but its conclusions don’t quite feel big enough for its format. Having now seen three of Steve…
Despite its misguided ending, Let Them All Talk remains a refreshingly open-ended and low-stakes pleasure. In the past decade, Adam Sandler has been regularly accused…
Anything for Jackson successfully manages the tricky balancing act of melding early comedy into outright terror. As festival season has gone mostly digital this year, we…
Much like its main character, Another Round is a film firmly situated somewhere between thrill and disappointment. The 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire once wrote, “You…