Khalik Allah’s new essayistic documentary Black Mother is a deeply moving work of humanistic empathy, intertwining the personal and the political into an aesthetic that attempts…
The foggy shores of Australia’s Christmas Island become a crossroad for migrants of both the human and animal variety in Gabrielle Brady’s haunted and moody…
Knife + Heart was probably the oddest entry in Cannes’ main competition slate last year — a trendy, queer, pop cinema throwback that stood-out in…
If nothing else, Gaspar Noe’s Climax suggests that, should someone ever decide to revive the Step Up franchise, Noe might be a name producers could consider.…
Christian Petzold is one of our great contemporary dramatists, taking the building blocks of melodrama and draining them of artificiality; he’s a kind of quotidian,…
Acclaimed film critic and programmer Kent Jones follows up 2015 documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut with his first fiction film as writer/director, yielding decidedly uneven results. Diane is a fairly…
As one of the only Iranian films with traction and visibility on the international festival circuit, Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces has much to prove. The…
Shot on gorgeous 35mm, and in director Laszlo Nemes’s preferred close-up style (ported in from his debut feature, Son of Saul), and employing what appears…
An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo’s bleak epic of lives spent swimming upstream in the modern economic conditions of China, is an exacting depiction of…
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…
Sometimes the determination between an actor’s successful and unsuccessful work comes down to context, like the ensemble of actors surrounding them, and sometimes it’s about the…
One baffling segment in BNK48: Girls Don’t Cry sees the Thai version of Japanese girl group AKB48’s “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” — one of the most popular J-pop singles…
Stephen King adaptations are as popular and generic as ever, despite claims of some kind of renaissance, and this latest iteration of Pet Sematary is hardly an exception.…
Perhaps setting itself up as a corrective to the rest of the DC comics films, which are apparently perceived to be overly dark and serious,…
The Dirt is a terrible movie. Adapted from Mötley Crüe’s group-authored autobiography of the same name, Jeff Tremaine’s film is This Is Spinal Tap without the self-aware irony,…
Released in 1967, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde was the New Hollywood urtext: young, sexy, fast, and violent. It’s impossible to view The Highwaymen as anything but a…
Suburban Birds opens with an iris shot, a formal gesture that likens it to Feng Xiaogang’s recent I Am Not Madame Bovary. Quickly, Qiu Sheng’s film…
The titular ‘land’ that’s ‘imagined’ in Yeo Siew Hua’s Golden Leopard-winning debut film manifests in two different ways, one explicitly physical (the ever-expanding continent of Singapore,…
The 48th edition of New Directors/New Films runs March 27th – April 7th. Here’s our first dispatch. Included — very much intentionally — in our second and…
It seems natural to react with bewildered laughter when watching Scanners. The sight of actors contorting themselves with pained screams and Dick Smith’s visceral special effects…
Frequently inscrutable and often enveloped in literal darkness, Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto offers the latest (cinematic) rumination on the foundational myth of man’s dealings with the…