The perfect film for anyone who’s ever pondered the existence of a gift shop at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is consumed…
Just shy of 10 years after winning an ill-deserved Palme d’Or for Dheepan (2015) — a leering intrusion into the lives of a makeshift Sri…
Hannah Peterson’s directorial debut, The Graduates, begins a year after the end of the “before,” a definitive “conclusion of youth” event that’s alluded to, but…
While the bibliographic career of Michel Houellebecq has never failed to court intrigue, praise, and rancor, his filmed performances have garnered relatively little attention. Perhaps…
Favoriten (2024), Ruth Beckermann’s latest, rolls production titles over a series of children’s drawings of buildings. Following a nigh universal youthful design scheme, the drawings…
Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes begins with a corker of an opening shot. Predominantly taking place at adjoining apartment complexes in Marseille separated by a courtyard, the film…
Lithuanian myths, folk songs, and hallucinations guide Deimantas Narkevičius’s film Twittering Soul. Set in the late 19th century before the Lumière Brothers began making films…
There’s a scene early on in Conclave, Edward Berger’s twisting, surprisingly pulpy thriller about the election of a new Pope, in which Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence…
The Alex Honnold we met in 2020’s Free Solo is no longer, apparently. Once a laser-focused, emotionally-detached athlete honed in on his solitary conquests and…
Robin Wood begins the introduction to his 1965 book Hitchcock’s Films with a question: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” It’s a deceptively simple query; as…
Wang Bing films have a reputation for their difficulty, but the opening film in his Youth trilogy, Youth (Spring), managed to be surprisingly varied and…
Director Mikio Naruse never garnered the acclaim of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Akira Kurosawa. The absence of a clearly legible “minimalism” (a reductive descriptor…