Benny Safdie, formerly of the eponymous directing team the Safdie brothers, makes his solo feature-directing debut with The Smashing Machine, and at a glance, the filmmaker…
Toward the beginning of Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.,” the rapper-cum-boardroom fixture adlibs a lament about a missed opportunity in real estate. “I coulda bought…
“We learned punk rock in Hollywood.” – Minutemen Film culture feels at times like it’s reached a dead end in the Letterboxd generation, cinephilia no…
In Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey two attractive yet emotionally wounded people take a magical mystery tour of their complicated pasts, traversing space, time,…
In Neo Sora’s Happyend, Tokyo — indeed, all of Japan — is preparing itself for a 100-year earthquake. The mood of the film’s opening scene,…
Comedies don’t get more uproarious than This Is Spinal Tap. The 1984 rockumentary has transcended its modest origins and settled into cinematic Hall of Fame…
It’s been a while since the world has been treated to a new Hal Hartley film. The writer/director’s career, which kicked off with 1989’s The…
“There is no dead matter,” the narrator’s father proselytizes in Bruno Schulz’s 1937 book Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, “lifelessness is only a…
The central tension of Caught Stealing — an ostensibly breezy “wrong man” comedic-thriller set in Giuliani-era New York City that finds our besieged main character, Hank…
The erotic thriller has encountered a resurgence in popularity of late, partly due to how well the genre plays at home, making it ideal escapism…
Can an auteur just take the piss every now and then? There’s always something distinctly perverse and ultimately scintillating about major figures going minor. It’s…
There’s an innate novelty to Ron Howard directing a film like Eden, and it’s disingenuous not to mention it. The filmmaker has by all reasonable…
Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been…
While at 5’5” both he and Woody Allen are the same height, Roman Polanski stands tallest on the Mount Rushmore of reviled living filmmakers. As…
In the intro to My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow, director Julia Loktev states that none of the subjects or herself…
In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the artform.…
Those who have seen the Zürcher twins’ other works, The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider, may have felt a tension building…
Athina Rachel Tsangari’s newest film, Harvest, begins on the precipice of change. Based on Jim Crace’s novel of the same name, Tsangari’s adaptation is set…
What remains of the video store today is a boutique novelty. Unless you happen to live in a neighborhood hip enough to indulge in cinephilic…
When the world turned to shit approximately five years ago, satire marched ahead, determined to outpace the banality of lived reality. Old-school broadcasts and appeals…