Few filmmakers have confronted the fractures of modern America with such formal rigor and moral devotion as Barbara Kopple. For several decades, the legendary documentarian…
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” So begins Kamel Laaridhi’s debut feature, The H@llow Man, with a quote…
Looking back to the heyday of the New Queer Cinema movement that ruled the ’90s (the term itself was coined by film critic and scholar…
If Los Angeles is the land of struggling actors languishing in food service — the sitcom Party Down plumbed this phenomenon for three seasons —…
Because of its ability to replicate life, the cinema has long been a preferred medium for exploring the meaning of death. People die in films…
As usual, a specter is haunting the art world, and the newest one wears a lot of different faces. AI-generated imagery is the place where…
According to the UN, nearly 1,000 Palestinians currently living in Jerusalem face eviction at the hands of the Israeli government. Of those permitted housing, less…
The mononymic Japanese director SABU, despite 30 years of steady work in the offbeat genre film mines, has never broken through in the West in…
Victims of bullying rarely find solace in the solutions of the school administrations that are meant to protect them and will often experience punishment for…
Italian filmmaker Riccardo Giacconi has been making experimental documentaries for the past 15 years. Possibly his best-known film to date is Two (2017), a medium-length…
“How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?!” That’s a line spoken by Bruce Willis as NYPD officer-turned-Nakatomi Plaza hero John McClane,…
Chris Hansen is a crusader of the postmodern world. A relentless careerist and ten-time Emmy winner, the Chicago-born media personality weaponized his television appearances in…
Identical twin sisters — so closely connected that they speak in unison, dream the same dreams, and furiously love the same man — dig a…
Film sets tend to be loud, full of people bustling around each other, in one breath bemoaning the lack of budget, materials, and film stock,…
Summer is closing. The weather remains warm, but the chill of autumn whispers its hello with a breeze that reminds us of time’s passing. It…
Since I first reviewed Chronovisor in my Rotterdam coverage this past February, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s feature debut has become a miniature sensation. Not…
It’s overselling Mayday a bit to suggest that it could have been made and released in 1987, when it takes place. That said, it’s rather…
There aren’t enough filmmakers, perhaps, still afraid of Virginia Woolf. Tina Gharavi, whose film I Am Nasrine was smuggled out of Tehran before being nominated…
In this Roundup: August Reviews…
Before beginning production on Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock invited screenwriter Arthur Laurents to dinner with his wife Alma. The film’s star, Farley Granger, with whom…
There’s a category of media that takes juvenile gleefulness in tarnishing comforting and wholesome nostalgic imagery with violence, sex, and existential darkness. Early internet games…