Fanboy darling Edgar Wright has certainly earned his reputation as a passionate pastiche artist and intricate stylist; his genre-infused films pair narratives of arrested male development with whiplash camerawork…
In her promising first feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour forewent the feminist messaging her film’s title might…
Utterly adventurous, João Pedro Rodrigues’s dizzying and highly personal The Ornithologist is loosely based on the life of St. Anthony of Padua and unfolds in the…
The 2017 BAMcinemafest ends this Sunday, and this dispatch concludes our coverage. Among the takes below, you’ll find several more holdovers from Sundance—including hit comedy The Big Sick and Alex Ross…
The 2017 BAMcinemafest kicked off yesterday, and it offers, frankly, a much more exciting lineup than did this year’s Cannes—especially if you have a vested…
An auteurist invention of the highest order, Matías Piñeiro’s ongoing “Shakespeare series” is the ideal platform to showcase the Argentinean director’s enticing and increasingly unique…
2017—so far at least—hasn’t been spectacular. In between the deaths of beloved auteurs like Jonathan Demme and Seijun Suzuki, you had 25 beating Lemonade at…
Recalling the softer screwballs of the 1930s—or, more specifically, modern imitations of those classics—This Is Not What I Expected is essentially You’ve Got Mail—except with the two…
China retrofit its communism with capitalism, so why shouldn’t it augment an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-indebted premise with the procedural plot points of Minority Report?…
Starting out as a bit of meta-commentary on a notorious massacre, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark quickly and deliberately questions its own point of…
Though Terence Davies was absent from the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2015, his Emily Dickinson film A Quiet Passion makes its appearance this year…
Alan Mak and Felix Chong, two-thirds of the team behind the very good Infernal Affairs series and the prime movers of the mediocre-at-best Overheard trilogy, team up again for Extraordinary Mission, a…
Give Nacho Vigalondo’s latest points for being consistently unpredictable: it’s a monster movie, in a sense, but the monsters turn out to be analogous for its…
“Everything disgusts me,” exclaims dying King Louis XIV (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The most disgusting thing present? The repulsive nature of aristocracy, laid out in full view…
“I hope we’ll have fun and party, that’s why I’m here!” This is what Lilly (Laure Calamy) tells an excited crowd of French retreaters in The…
Ala Eddine Slim’s The Last of Us is the type of film that’s inevitably described as “spare,” “rigorous,” and “conceptually bold.” Unfolding over a distended 94…
The 46th edition of New Directors/New Films concluded this past Sunday with Dustin Guy Defa’s much-discussed Person to Person. Our final dispatch from the festival takes a look at…
Alice Lowe’s character in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers was named Tina; in her own directorial debut, Prevenge, she plays Ruth. Really, though, the different names don’t matter:…
If there’s one noticeable (and troubling) trend in this year’s ND/NF , it’s a pointless rigor exerted in an effort to appear more “serious.” Case in point, Zhang…
The 46th edition of New Directors/New Films kicked off last Wednesday (March 15th) and ends this Sunday (March 24th). For our first of two dispatches…