André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his lack of stature, De Toth receives only a cursory nod…

The Last Duel is another win for Scott, an agreeably brutal, wickedly incisive tale that is considerably more substantive than mere Rashomon comps. Blending his lavish but gritty historical epics like Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven…

Kanye West The announcement of a new Kanye West album — his tenth in fact — brought with it the delighted attention of the usual, dusty music-minded media institutions, desperate to hitch themselves to…

Parallel Mothers If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest feature crystallizes this as fact. His first feature since…

The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician, tends to reconstruct rather than document, reincorporating tokens of…

After Asako I & II, Hamaguchi’s latest can’t help but feel like something of a step backward into less aesthetically daring filmmaking. “Once Again”, the third and final chapter of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new omnibus film…

The French Dispatch For better or for worse, there are few working American auteurs whose visual stamps are as broadly and immediately recognizable as Wes Anderson. Not even shifting mediums from live-action to stop…

Bergman Island is an intentionally ephemeral, frictionless bit of meta-fiction, conceptually justifiable but all the more frustrating for it. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally, an insular film. Set almost entirely on the island…

The Blazing World is a disarmingly charmless and amateurish series of indie genre check-boxes that amounts to a whole lot of nothing. With horror films in general and especially as they are increasingly mired in…

Nas Is Nas in “rare form,” as he claims on King’s Disease II, or just a tad moldy? This question was already resoundingly answered on the previous installment — which was most definitely the…

Madres hardly justifies the whole Blumhouse/Amazon deal, but it’s at least the best of the eight films that have come courtesy of it.  Director Ryan Zaragoza’s Madres is undoubtedly the best of the second wave of Amazon/Blumhouse…

The Manor isn’t necessarily a good film, but it’s a fun enough lite-horror outing that reflects an improvement from the Blumhouse/Amazon team-up. The law of averages dictates that it was bound to happen, but it…