The rare Shinya Tsukamoto film to not star the director himself, Shadow of Fire is his third consecutive period piece, following Fires on the Plain…
In its early narrative, Simone Scafidi’s Dario Argento Panico introduces its eponymous subject, now in his 80s, as a sort of mythologized figure — a…
The virtues of Danish director Nikolaj Arcel’s new feature, The Promised Land, are those of old-school Hollywood studio pictures. The film is scrupulously well-constructed in…
In his books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze draws a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image is concerned with linear…
Fabio D’Orta’s The Complex Forms opens with a long pan over a burning car, set to an audacious classical piece, that slowly flips 180 degrees…
Pete Ohs’ amiably idiosyncratic new feature Love and Work is set in a future where jobs are illegal. It begins with Diane (Stephanie Hunt, also…
What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection for…
The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of realism.…
The worst thing a film — or any other form of art — can do is work too hard to be about something. This is…
Citizen Weiner What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused…
Horror movies often demand that viewers to extend a generous amount of leeway when it comes to logic. Does it make sense that the woman…
They say that comedy is subjective, but even that benign truism can’t begin to explicate the lunacy at the heart of Hundreds of Beavers. It’s…
Ma Dong-seok does it again in Netflix’s Badland Hunters. Like most of his notable roles post-Train to Busan (2016), he plays a haymaking Byronic hero…
Desire Lines is a hybrid film that understands the themes it wants to address, but struggles to find the formal means. Part conventional talking heads…
Cinema has undergone two significant, canvas-expanding innovations so far in the 21st century. The first, as ushered in especially by the films of Timur Bekmambetov…
Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s debut feature, Mambar Pierrette, opens with the mundane rhythms of domestic work. Mambar (Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat), a seamstress in the city…
Where have all the taboo romances gone? Admittedly, the trailer for Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl didn’t inspire much hope for their return, particularly since…
In Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, the protagonist — a young office worker named Fran (Daisy Ridley) — leads a scheduled life both…
From the first moments of Tótem, it’s easy to think about Lucas Dhont, which is never a good thing. Like Dhont’s recently released Close, Lila…
For action fans of a certain persuasion (read: low- and mid-budget DTV), just seeing the names Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White, Aaron Toney, Tim Man,…