Reinventing the superhero genre often entails energizing it, usually with piled-on camp (as with Troma Entertainment’s The Toxic Avenger and, more recently, Marvel’s Deadpool) or…
For years now, director Ursula Meier has been interested in boundaries and the reasons we cross them. Her debut feature Strong Shoulders (2003) is about…
Three features into his career as director, and Louis Garrel’s vision remains unexpected and lively, channeled into decidedly comedic pieces that stand apart from the…
Depicting larger-than-life subjects has always posed some representational challenges: inch the individual too perfectly into focus, and one runs the risk of hagiography, but impose…
Walk Up is Hong Sang-soo’s trickiest film since The Day After (2017), and his most intricately structured effort since The Day He Arrives (2012). With…
Documentarian of the personal, Su Friedrich’s latest film, Today, begins with a story. A friend reads aloud a passage from The Odyssey, in which Odysseus…
At the very start of his career, Stephen Frears was seen as part of a wave of exciting British filmmakers, many of whom often worked…
The numbers aren’t wrong: the most successful film of 2023 to date, and the most successful film of Zhang Yimou’s career, is also one of…
Depending on your disposition, New York City’s claustrophobic crush of humanity is either unsettling or liberating, if not both simultaneously — it’s not easy to…
Naomi Kawase’s 2014 romance drama Still the Water is never short on striking imagery. Set in Amami Ôshima, an island off the southern coast of…
For a director like Neil Jordan, whose long, seemingly middle-of-the-road filmography actually houses digressions from respectable adaptation into unrespectable pulp and soap, a Raymond Chandler…
Running through a field of brightly colored flowers might seem an awfully clichéd image of childhood innocence, but there is some hope that Lukas Dhont’s…
On the occasion of him winning the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for his film Shoplifters, I called Hirokazu Kore-eda “the Ron…
Banned from filmmaking for 20 years back in 2010 for making what the Iranian government deemed “propaganda against the system,” Jafar Panahi has nevertheless remained…
The first thing you notice about Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is the color palette. It’s desaturated in the extreme — isolated shots even look almost…
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed proceeds in such awe of its subject that it strips the film of any thorniness that the material demands. All…
One Fine Morning doesn’t stand out in Hansen-Løve’s filmography, but there’s enough here to suggest that it could resonate more fully in the long term. Stepping…
Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale boasts an interest back-to-his-roots quality, but also affirms all of the director’s worst tendencies. Although The Whale is an adaptation of the…
In pushing viewers past the limits of reality, The Eternal Daughter more vividly than ever paints the loss and alienation undergirding Hogg’s cinema. “No live…
White Noise regrettably sees Baumbach prioritize shallow spectacle and satire over human passions. “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” eminent Car Crash Studies…