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,…
Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of the filmmaker’s…
Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against…
In his 1998 monograph on gay male identification with the Broadway musical, Place for Us: Essay on the American Musical, D.A. Miller identifies the archetypal…
Raoul Peck’s latest documentary certainly has timeliness going for it. There is of course a rise of authoritarianism around the world, a set of schemes…
Of Kelly Reichardt’s many talents behind the camera, historically, she is not a filmmaker you would refer to as “a trickster” — there is little…
In the last 10 or 15 years, the micro-universe that we call the experimental film world has made a decisive shift toward a form of…
How refreshing it is to see a debut film. Movies by established directors, even directors one likes, carry the burden of expectation. “Every movie is…
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…