To the avid film festival observer, the gargantuan, Odyssean works of Filipino director Lav Diaz competing or winning an award is something of a staple.…
Immersing yourself in a new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is akin to reluctantly catching up with an old friend. As of late, there’s…
Throughout Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ documentary Cover-Up, Seymour “Sy” Hersh, claims that he does not psychoanalyze himself. The irony is that the legendary journalist…
There’s a mighty thin line between minimalism and indolence, and Jim Jarmusch has walked it his entire career. When you choose minimalism, you amplify the…
“The most dangerous thing you can do in life is play it safe.” Though it would not be difficult to imagine, these words were not…
Those inclined to immediately exit the theater or press stop on their remotes the instant a film concludes would do well to take a beat…
Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured a singer, a composer,…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino is back on terra firma with La Grazia, his second film to premiere in less than 18 months, following on the heels…
A visual motif that reoccurs throughout Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, is a spiral staircase. Beyond being chic and Parisian in the way…
In the opening title scroll of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, the Brazil of 1977 the film takes place in is announced as “a…
A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar…
“Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The question is posed from one beleaguered raver to another, on a school bus somewhere…
Ira Sachs’ 2010 short film Last Address presents an unadorned montage of New York City apartment buildings and rowhouses, each of which once housed an…
There comes a tale from an antique land. A King ruled over a thin Isthmus, above and below which were two unfathomably large continents. A…
In Sentimental Value, there’s a scene where the veteran filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, explains to his newly discovered lead actress, Rachel Kemp,…
“Isn’t it obvious?” The question, volleyed by a PHD student at her trusted mentor, hangs in the air of a darkly lit stairwell as the…
Radu Jude is aiming for nothing less than the grand finale of vampire movies with his Dracula, and as a Romanian, why shouldn’t he lay…
Desolate, grim, and hopelessly introverted, The Boss’s album Nebraska captures a slice of America that’s as caustic and fresh today as it was in 1981.…
The bees are dying. That’s bad news for all of us, but for Teddy (Jesse Plemons), the apiarist at the center of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia,…