While at 5’5” both he and Woody Allen are the same height, Roman Polanski stands tallest on the Mount Rushmore of reviled living filmmakers. As conversation about abuses of power and sexual manipulation in the film industry became normalized in the mid-2010s, Polanski was first in line for…
Like many of you, I first discovered the French New Wave as a budding cinephile in high school. It was my introduction to how the world’s cinema historians structured film history as their short “waves” could represent both a shift in global culture in toto in the 1960s…
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is an impressionistic look at a small beach town in South Florida awaiting a large Hurricane to pass through. Simpson’s interest lies not in classic disaster movie set pieces, but rather in sitting with these Floridians deep into the night as they wait…
Upon initial release in 2016, Shin Godzilla — the product of co-directors Hideaki Anno (creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Shinji Higuchi (storyboard/SFX artist) — was a sizeable return to form for the series, out-grossing the 2014 U.S. franchise reboot, registering as the second-highest-grossing film domestically behind Your…
Your films have been widely described as having thematic preoccupations with the future and its anxieties, but at the same time they also are imbued with a very potent sense of the romantic. Even Nocturama, a film which ends in guns and fury, doesn’t quite fit the mold…
At first glance, the Gstaad Palace looks like the last vestige of European aristocracy. The town of Gstaad, Switzerland itself catered only to the ultra-wealthy of the 20th century as evinced by quite the proud roll call of celebrities and moguls on its Wikipedia page. So, the Palace…
In a famous 1960 piece for Cahiers du Cinema, titled “In Defense of Violence,” Michel Mourlet bluntly states: “Charlton Heston is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty. The pent-up violence expressed by the sombre phosphorescence of…
After Jerry Seinfeld and his “What’s the deal?” color commentary on the silliness of the quotidian struck gold in Seinfeld, comedians started to habitually appear in comedies and sitcoms, popping up like dandelions, most of it harmless. But rarely was anyone or anything as incisively irreverent or eccentric…
Karin Dreijer returns with Radical Romantics, their highly collaborative third album under the solo moniker Fever Ray — with production from heavy hitters like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and multiple features from Karin’s brother/former bandmate in the Knife, Olaf Dreijer. Opener “What They Call Us” reflects on…
Nowadays we’re saddled with tepid action comedy stuff like The Lost City or Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s alleged chemistry in the Jurassics World. This tossed-off, anodyne content is destined to merely wind up on some streaming service rather than actually attaining any memorability. It’s more than…
The Worst Ones, the debut film from Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, opens on interviews with the young French people Flemish film director Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh) has chosen to cast in his new film. That film, which we’re later told is called Pissing in the North Wind, is…
Beginning life as a multimedia installation mixing sculpture, film, and paper archival documents, Éric Baudelaire’s When There Is No More Music to Write project has evolved into a new form, with a slightly addended title. Making its North American premiere at Film at Lincoln Center’s 2022 edition of…
National Champions isn’t even good enough to make the playoffs. Adapted from the Adam Mervis play of the same name, Ric Roman Waugh’s National Champions follows a nascent labor movement in collegiate American football, with a young quarterback on the precipice of a star career embarking on a strike…
Greenland does well to focus on its human center rather than CGI spectacle, but its pleasures remain mostly minor. The disaster film is a genre as old as cinema itself, dating back at least to Edwin Porter filming a house burning down in 1903. The modern template was arguably…
Taking as his subject the Japanese company Family Romance LLC, director Werner Herzog returns to offer a work widely labelled as ‘strange’ by the media that renders the line between real and artificial indistinct. Titled as it is — Family Romance LLC, after the company — the film plays out through a series of…
Chromatica delivers occasional melodic pleasures but is otherwise stripped of the complexity and contradiction that usually defines Gaga’s brand of pop. Each new release from Lady Gaga following the Fame and Born This Way heyday is more disarming than the last — increasingly structured around an aesthetic idea with…
Our third and final dispatch from the 2019 BFI London Film Festival is offers thoughts on one of the upcoming awards season’s biggest players — Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood — as well as a litany of small, international fare, including: 2019 fall festival circuit…
Johnny Jewel’s music is imbued with an eldritch air of nostalgia, the coupling of retro synth-pop and filmic ambiance bringing to mind images of a late night drive along a caliginous road; his production gleams like a rain-slick street, and the recalcitrant synth lines and guitar riffs buzz…
The corrupt progress of global capitalism is and has been an inevitability for the past half century, its footprint visible in the bruises mottling the surface of society and making vulnerable all but the ultra-monied elite. The Laundromat takes aim at this reality and hopes its righteous fury…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…