In this dispatch: Behemoth!, Bardi…
Alex Serian has been away for a long time. At the start of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, the gifted cellist (played with great commitment by Pedro…
There is a certain expectation that comes with a film’s selection for the Currents section of the New York Film Festival, not least because the…
It’s taken a while for cinephiles (including this writer) to catch up with the Vienna-based filmmaking duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Their profile…
In this dispatch: Possible Love, Heil…
Whatever one thinks of Carlos Reygadas, it’s hard to argue against his ability to open a movie. His newest film Heil Jupiter!, largely spoken in…
Partway through Verity, Dakota Johnson’s protagonist, well on her way to seducing her employer’s husband (played by Josh Hartnett), takes a bite out of a…
Where do you start with something like Digger? It’s smug, self-satisfied, cynical, but also genuinely bleak and actually pretty thoughtful. It wants desperately to be…
Parsing the cinema’s relation to sound, Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “…the sound as well as visual elements of the image enter into internal relations which…
In this dispatch: All of a Sudden…
The post-Drive My Car films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi have built a case for the director as the most acclaimed contemporary filmmaker in the world. Even…
“Cinema has something premonitory about it,” says Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), the cult director-turned-adman at the center of Bitter Christmas. It’s a statement director Pedro Almodóvar…
“Is there even a suspect? Is there even a crime?” These words spoken by Detective Mijares (Alchris Galura) are as good a summation as you’re…
In this dispatch: The Day She Returns…
Every time a Hong Sang-soo film plays at a film festival, one can assume someone in the audience is encountering the prolific filmmaker for the…
It is perhaps inevitable that a higher number of films are going to be focused on the difficulties of aging as birth rates decline and…
You’d think it would be impossible to create a new vision of death and the afterlife after more than a century of cinematic depictions. A…
Schaumburg, Illinois is a nexus of American suburban living. The Chicago suburb is an affluent village that sits 25 miles outside the city proper; its…
Escaping from the claws of corporate homogeneity and shared cinematic universes is Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, almost certainly the strangest film…
In this dispatch: A Long Winter…
Andrew Haigh has proven adept, at times exceptionally so, at crossing diverse conceptual landscapes. His relationship dramas, of both the young and queer (Weekend, Looking,…