The murder mystery has proven conducive, in recent years, for mashing up tired genre formulae. It has also provided a studded launching pad, marketing and…
Lucy Kerr’s debut feature Family Portrait is a startling discovery. An elliptical puzzle of a film that circles around a mystery that is never answered,…
Lucy Kerr’s feature debut Family Portrait begins in media res, at the titular scene. There’s chaos, but initially the chaos is only visual. The soundtrack…
As Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade, Last Summer scans initially as an altogether more mannered affair for the director. Known for her sexually…
A cautionary tale of Hollywood hubris that’s essentially been lost to time — thus negating its effectiveness as said cautionary tale — Dick Powell’s 1956…
How does one approach a film that reveals everything about itself in its opening sequence? Do we applaud its ability to summarize its themes succinctly?…
If you watch Trigger Warning, Netflix’s latest big-budget action movie, with captions turned on, you may notice the phrase “terrorist, in Arabic” in the film’s…
The provocations of the Italian poet, critic, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini have been, for contemporary viewers, largely condensed into that one magnum opus of…
Covered in paint, drawn from hell, the Swedish soft-metal-theatrical-intractable band Ghost has been ascending toward the surface of mainstream pop-cultural stardom since their 2022 album…
Two households, both alike in silent grief, In fair Midwest town, where we lay our scene, From ancient sorrow break to new relief, Where art…
Spare a thought for the enfant terrible who finds themselves just this side of respectable. The filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has, over the past 15 years,…
Maybe more than any of its brethren of subgenre monsters, the exorcism film The Exorcist (1973) looms large over its brood of descendants. There are…
Alex Ross Perry first made a name for himself in an emerging class of young New York filmmakers in the late aughts. What followed was…
“The physical world relies on a much more complex universe. Like fish who cannot see the water they are in, we are immersed in something…
A mother and daughter’s symbiotic bond fuels the artistic crucible that underlies Janet Planet. Such a description, let alone the title, might indicate a film…
Jazzy Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center…
Bikechess is a strange name for Assel Aushakimova’s latest work. The scene that gives the Kazakh film its name comes in the beginning, with the…
Don Hardy’s career as a documentary filmmaker has spanned an eclectic range of themes that are bound, in some way, by an interest in mystery,…
To the uninitiated, techno music might feel forbiddingly sterile, lacking the warmth of familiar analog instruments or the collaborative dynamic of bandmates, songwriters, and producers.…
It’s hard to find much at all to say about Thelma, an agreeably light, mostly affectionate comedy that basically seems calculated to make you want…