A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion…
A pregnant woman nearing delivery self-pleasures by rubbing her privates against a bedpost. An attempted murder, in a flavor reminiscent of the book of…
There are two films that writer-director Zarrar Kahn struggles to reconcile in his feature-length debut In Flames. The first, a domestic drama about women…
With Yannick, filmmaker and absurdist Quentin Dupieux has synthesized the irreverent, a product of his usual gags and conceits, and the satirical, afforded by…
Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim…
Fewer subgenres in recent memory have had a more fleeting window of viability, if ever it even really existed, than the “pandemic film.” Beyond…
Of Living Without Illusion A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier…
New Directors/New Films takes a certain amount of pride in the names they’ve launched, and it’s not unjustified: any festival that can boast Hou…
A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film,…
In his book Codes For North, filmmaker and film historian Stephen Broomer posits a history of experimental film as an “art that is a…
The sophomore film from Brazilian director André Novais Oliveira is a charming cinematic miniature that observes the unfolding of an ordinary day that potentially…
With his breakout directorial feature Ex Machina, Alex Garland reduced a story that demanded to question the relationship between a body and a soul…
The inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies closed this past Sunday with the world premiere of Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar’s…
Ned Benson’s The Greatest Hits opens with its heroine, Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a young librarian, standing alone in her beautifully half-lit, tranquil apartment before…
Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji’s feature directorial debut, Omen, is a promising if not confident fable. Koffi (Mark Zinga) and Alice (Lucie Debay) return home to…
ESSAYS A SYNONYM FOR BELIEF: TENET AS FUGUE FEATURE BY: Milo Garner THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES: SEX ON SCREEN AND IT FOLLOWS AT TEN…
Does pop culture really need another Tom Ripley adaptation? That’s a fair question, considering just a couple of summers ago the fashion world was…