“This must be my punishment,” narrates Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), as he recalls the frog he tortured in a grade school science class. Mickey…
The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended…
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, after premiering at last year’s Venice Film Festival and winning the festival’s prize for Best Screenplay, amassed an unforeseen…
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic…
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language films have operated in a particularly confessional mode. Featuring The Room Next Door’s co-star Tilda Swinton, his 2020 short…
The linchpin scene of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist arrives nearly an hour into its 215-minute runtime when Adrien Brody’s Hungarian architect, László Tóth, sits…
In Werner Herzog’s latest, Theater of Thought, the director largely known in his documentary work for discursive flights of wonderful pontification takes an American…
Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel of the same name, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys grapples with a level of tragedy and systemic…
After spending his early career transfiguring the aesthetics of early Jean-Luc Godard and other works from the French New Wave’s starting days for his…
Since his 2011 debut feature Snowtown, Justin Kurzel’s films have displayed a laser-like focus on rough, sometimes savage men and the environments that foster…
Six years ago, Mike Leigh produced his first war film, Peterloo, in which domestic unrest in 1819 led British troops to slaughter protesting civilians.…
One of the more indelible sequences in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breakthrough documentary, The Act of Killing, features one of its subjects, the Indonesian paramilitary thug…
The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly in-joke of…
As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite…
In William S. Burroughs’ novella Queer, Lee takes Allerton, the object of his all-consuming desire, to see Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. “In the dark theater,” Burroughs…
The last image of Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, is one of the most heartbreaking in his long, storied, notorious, glorious, defining, essential career. It is…
Engaged in a lengthy process of simultaneous expansion and refinement, the indefatigable Hong Sang-soo seems to practice a new, yet knowingly familiar, alchemy with…
Andrea Arnold is not without talent, but she has some of the worst instincts of any allegedly major director. Take Fish Tank, for example.…