The Traitor operates as both biopic and mob flick, reveling in the murky complexity of its central figure. A biopic of Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta (played…
Color Out of Space is a willing 80s horror throwback but relies on its foregone status as future cult film rather than developing anything truly excellent.…
Bonello’s attempt to meld cultural commentary with a historical consideration of colonialist sins is lost amid a commitment to tension-building. Voodoo, as represented in Zombi Child,…
VHYes is a wannabe absurdist curiosity but is instead an interminable viewing experience. Jack Henry Robbins’ VHYes is the kitschy, post-ironic, pseudo-found footage 80’s pastiche the world didn’t…
The shallow characterizations at the core of Les Misérables dampen the effect of its incendiary anger. Ladj Ly’s debut feature may be called Les Misérables,…
Weathering with You is a heartwarming and delicately animated escapist fantasy finds hope in hardscrabble realities. Makoto Shinkai has already proved himself an idiosyncratic anime filmmaker…
“Whatever was going to happen has already happened,” says the protagonist of Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut feature, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca). This is…
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 into some…
The first image of Agnes Varda’s 1965 film Le Bonheur (meaning “happiness” in English) is that of a yellow sunflower beaming in the radiant light of…
…Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its…
Over a decade before the Coen Brothers released their neo-noir, blood-soaked vision of Americana, Blood Simple, Terrence Malick’s Badlands etched into the public consciousness a…
It’s not entirely fair to ding Bad Boys For Life for not being a Michael Bay movie, but late into the notorious climax of Bay’s…
It’s been a year of confrontation at the movies, as the domestic and international conflicts of the past several years have reached varying degrees of…
An experimental documentary of modest means and sweeping scale, Chinese Portrait offers a scintillating snapshot of a rapidly changing nation. Director Wang Xiaoshuai assembled the…
Seberg is just the latest film to signal its interest in issues of racial injustice, and progressive commentary, only to counterproductively build itself around the travails…
Peter Strickland is a stylistic maximalist, an homage specialist who makes Tarantino look like a film school pedant. Along with Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani…
From its title alone, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life concerns itself with subjects that cinema often struggles to depict: the twin blossomings of consciousness and conscience. In…
The films of Jessica Hausner can be maddeningly opaque, but obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. Her newest film, Little Joe, makes a fascinating double feature…
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Chinonye Chukwu’s grim death row drama Clemency begins with a lethal injection gone wrong,…
There are fewer than 45 government-funded emergency ambulances in Mexico City — far from the sufficient number of vehicles needed to provide for the capital…