Director Mark Jenkin’s Bait is a fascinating curiosity. As a drama, it’s fairly basic, but also mostly effective: Martin & Steven Ward (Edward Rowe &…
Belonging opens with a voice-over delivering an admission of guilt, one coldly articulated by Onur (Çaglar Yalçinkaya), as he hastily divulges the details surrounding the…
The 48th edition of New Directors/New Films runs March 27th – April 7th. For our first of two dispatches, we tackle the second feature from Canadian filmmaker Philippe…
Modestly assembled and expertly executed, David Wenham’s delightful debut feature Ellipsis conjures those occasions when human connection comes calling, often in spite of some general apathy. Employing a…
Ash Is Purest White begins with the blaring of a bus horn — a sound which bears striking resemblance to another, heard at the end…
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi understands the nature of secrets and their revelations, that they rarely signal resolution and instead work to further complicate situations. Whenever…
Early in the second half of J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Ben Affleck’s character executes a South American cocaine farmer, lying on the ground, just moments…
A young man heads to Singapore in search of his mother’s family after his father, a successful ramen chef, dies. Gauzy flashbacks fill in his parents’…
Us begins with a sincerely spooky prologue taking place in 1986, when young Addy wanders away from her bickering parents at the Santa Cruz boardwalk and…
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is one of the least-sexy films ever made about sex. Libidinous, yes, and full of naked bodies in salacious motion, engaging…
As with 2010’s exceptional October Country, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s The Gospel of Eureka brings an intelligent, discerning empathy to matters of political, moral,…
Birds of Passage, Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s latest collaborative effort (previously a producer, Gallego serves as co-director here) finds the duo continuing their thematic…
There’s a fine line between the absurd and the transcendent, and Tim Sutton’s Donnybrook crosses it with ludicrous abandon. Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) is a…
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…
Like Black Panther before it, the representational bona-fides of Captain Marvel, the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe, entry have been at the forefront of its marketing and…
We’re a long ways away from when directors like Allan Dwan and Joseph H. Lewis could pack an absurd amount of plot into 70-minute features;…
It’s been 20 years since game-changer The Blair Witch Project hit cinemas, and yet the found-footage horror sub-genre is going strong. Just last year, both the well-regarded horror sequel Unfriended: Dark…
In Alex Lehmann’s Paddleton, Mark Duplass and Ray Romano play Michael and Andy, a couple of sadsack, socially awkward, loser neighbors who have struck up…
Jean Luc-Godard’s career came to an end in 1967, with Weekend — only for it to rise again out of the ashes, and for the filmmaker…
A Perfect World’s title is contradictory, born from a phrase that implies that life will never really amount to what we want it to — but…
Brothers of the Night concerns a loose network of young Bulgarian men who, unable to find work in Vienna, instead prowl the city streets selling…