If Peter Farrelly acquired any auteurist pretensions after undeservedly winning the Oscar for Best Picture with his insincere race-relations road movie Green Book (2018), he…
“What are the stats on shark movies? Still just the one good one?” That’s a direct quote from perennial funnyman Paul F. Tompkins, made during…
In the new Apple TV original film Outcome, Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a hugely successful actor emerging from a five-year hiatus that found…
It might be a little premature to have the “late style” conversation with regard to the highly prolific Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who turns 69 in July.…
The time travel mob comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice opens with the actor Ben Schwartz singing a foul-mouthed rendition of the Billy…
Jessie Buckley’s hesitant recitation of Bonedog — the achingly painful poem written by Eva H.D. — is one of the most memorably harrowing sequences in…
Sometimes you can tell right away that you’re in for a thoroughly generic bit of junk food, but that’s not always instructive of quality. Often,…
Ever since Terrence Malick pretty much pulled it off with The Tree of Life, every few years another auteur — usually in the sci-fi idiom…
The Bluff isn’t the same kind of pirate film as Pirates of the Caribbean. Unlike the leviathan Disney franchise, The Bluff has very little seafaring,…
A severely schematic crime thriller that paints a rather stereotypical picture of the Brazilian underworld but is chiefly about how many long, unbroken, and overhead…
Filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli took the 2020 TIFF Midnight Madness crowd by storm with their stunning debut feature Violation, an extremely dark,…
Joe Carnahan’s career has been relatively erratic since his still very well-regarded breakout feature Narc from 2002. Since, he’s mostly churned out gritty but generic…
Setting themselves far apart from most of the indie/DIY horror scene that focuses on squeaky exploitation thrills and slasher stuff (not that there’s anything wrong…
I once carpooled from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to my small hometown in Northeast Ohio with a stranger. She was an attractive woman…
Kim Byung-woo’s fifth directorial effort, The Great Flood, first shows An-na (Kim Da-mi) resignedly trying to quell her six-year-old son Ja-in’s (Kwon Eun-seong) insistent and…
Michael Showalter, in the past decade, has parlayed his success as a comedic writer and performer into a career as a writer-director of audience-pleasing dramedies…
A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies…
With only two features — 2020’s Shithouse and 2022’s Cha Cha Real Smooth — and a short film under his belt, Cooper Raiff has already…
Rian Johnson brought the whodunnit into the 21st century, for better or worse. Knives Out revived it, imbuing the subgenre with the cozy vibes we…
In the 21st century, almost every film beyond a certain tax bracket is transnational in nature. Choose even a lower-budget indie film, ostensibly maintained in…
Sincerity is dead at the movies, and this fall season has treated us to a preponderance of autopsies as proof — Bugonia, A House of…