“Four years have passed since the accident. You feel that your relationship to radioactive contamination is changing,” intones the narrator near the beginning of Ana…
Andreas Fontana’s 2021 film Azor told the story of Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship through the lens of a ground-level functionary, observing how unremarkable bankers and…
It’s a common refrain that it takes an outsider filmmaker to capture the truth of a place. An influx of Germans like Billy Wilder and…
Georgian filmmaker Uta Beria’s Tear Gas opens on a series of still images depicting people in migration, which eventually bleeds into the moving image as…
Schematically, one could divide Hong Sang-soo’s oeuvre into two sets of films: on the one hand, those where the structural play with narrative is upfront…
Who could forget that scene in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s character narrates what life is like in prison for “wiseguys”? As his cellmates slice garlic…
The decadent luxury and moral rot of extreme wealth; a location as isolated as it is idyllic; lithe young bodies glistening in sunlight; the churning…
Sometimes you just need to get a little stupid with it. That’s not an insult; it’s a label writer/director Dylan Meyer wears proudly on her…
A nasty, ruthlessly streamlined throwback to the sleepover staples of the Reagan administration, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street (unofficially) brings the curtain…
Marketed as “a Green Day comedy,” Lee Kirk’s newest film, Nimrods, could more fittingly be described as specious or surprisingly inept. Or, it could be…
A few years ago while re-watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma, I was taken aback when 2a: Only Cinema ended with a durational shot of…
Flitting across genres from musical to beekeeping drama to heist movie to revenge thriller, yet rooted in the culture, ways of life, and eccentricities of…
A frontier western without any ontologically stable sense of indigeneity or the homestead, Pablo Aparo’s The Victors is a film that resists the easy binaries…
Like his previous feature, which opens with a 1988 Coca-Cola ad, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon begins with another vintage commercial — or, at least, a…
Dedicating more attention to the practicalities and criminal underbelly of the farm-to-table honey industry than certainly any fiction film before it, Andrew Patterson’s The Rivals…
Relative to its paltry budget, 2001’s Super Troopers, the second film from American comedy troupe Broken Lizard (consisting of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme,…
The critical concept of intersectionality, like “wokeness” or “critical race theory,” has been evacuated of its actual meaning by bad-faith bloggers and the conservative commentariat.…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
In 1970, Robb Moss took a semester off from Berkeley and started wandering to wherever he could crash, first out to a friend’s farm in…
American independent filmmaker and cinematographer Rob Tregenza broke onto the scene with 1988’s Talking to Strangers, a somewhat Jarmuschian dramedy that was notable for being…
It’s a fair response for one to give less importance to mainstream directors when they downplay their themes or politics in interviews, for if the…