In this dispatch: You Don’t Belong…
A purveyor of artifice and decadence, the films of Bertrand Mandico are at their most interesting on the purely visual plane. He fills his frames with cluttered mise-en-scène, gargoyle-esque character actors, and abstract lighting designs that call back to the erotic energy of ’70s and ’80s exploitation flicks.…
Like his 2010 film Cologne Overnight, Declan Clarke’s latest, Love and the End of Romance in Czechoslovakia, takes an instructive approach. Title cards loaded with written information about Czechoslovakian history between the two World Wars are broken up by images of the many works by the famous and…
Ol Parker is no stranger to a feel-good star vehicle. He wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, and directed Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and Ticket to Paradise, the latter of which was described in this publication by Matt Lynch as “[meeting] the technical…
We don’t have many stars like Jason Statham left. If the ‘80s gave us a plethora of iconic tough guys, the ensuing decades have whittled them away via changes in social norms and the relentless march of time — indeed, there’s a certain sociological interest in witnessing the…
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…