Titles are a funny thing. Adapted from a 2020 novel of the same name, Eli Craig’s horror-comedy Clown in a Cornfield takes the same tact as recent genre films Death of a Unicorn and Cocaine Bear in using its title to dispel any mystery of what it might be about, while also signaling…
It makes sense that Joel Potrykus has remained a Michigan filmmaker his entire career. His rebellious, don’t-ask-permission attitude is right at home in a state without a formal film office, where the only things stopping you from making a film are getting a camera in your hand and…
Underground Kaori Oda’s Underground is a film built around the meanings of its title, but it’s also apparently built up to 83 minutes out of reused footage from an earlier and shorter Oda film called Gama, which ran for a mere 53 minutes. Fittingly for a film that…
After a rich and varied March release landscape, April came back down to Earth a bit. There were still exciting, under-the-radar releases (Gazer, Henry Fonda for President, The Code, Invention)and a few high-profile studio flicks that actually delivered the good (Sinners, Warfare), but the month was also bursting…
In 2001, Jia Zhangke made Unknown Pleasures, in which Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao Qiao who tries to make a living as a singer and model while juggling the attentions of her abusive agent Qiao San (played by Li Zhubin), her young boyfriend Xiao Ji, and…
A cascading slant of coastal daylight betrays the futile dangers of vacation time in Durga Chew-Bose’s sensual, stilling, and elegiac rendition of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel of the same name. In this sun-soaked yet moodily cavernous adaptation, summertime sadness is a formative, virginal strain of sorrow, “a strange…
There are few genuinely pleasurable elements in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses. Adapted by Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name, the film’s story of mid-century queer life is a crushingly timid homage to the sweeping Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s: thematically didactic, straight-faced, and…
In Fire Island, director Andrew Ahn and writer/actor Joel Kim Booster retrofitted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not just as a means to reflect the current moment, but to expand it in ways that were probably inconceivable in Austen’s time and imagination. Ahn has similarly transformative aims with…
In 1971, legendary rock artists and power couple John Lennon and Yoko Ono left their estate in London and moved to New York. For 18 months they lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village, mixing with like-minded artists and political radicals while spending their leisure time… watching…
After 2021’s El Planeta, Amalia Ulman ups the ante with her second feature, Magic Farm, in every conceivable way. Black-and-white cinematography here gives way to a more energetic camera (shooting in color), featuring cutaways to GoPro footage attached to skateboards and animals. Whereas her debut was a two-hander…
About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas are as powerful as the products we can turn them into. It’s a cynical line, perhaps, or maybe just realistic. But it’s also an…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve long marked the spot where a dead body was buried, such that mourning can become a location-based task — one goes to where…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And if we assume this experiment was begun by a set of optimistic scientists — fortunate enough to have acquired…
With his latest feature, director Robert Schwentke has moved away from his Time Traveler’s Wife, Divergent, Snake Eyes-days of bad blockbuster filmmaking. Seneca — On the Creation of Earthquakes is roughly as audience-unfriendly as films come, sometimes to its benefit, but mostly otherwise. For proof, simply start with…
A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down to kiss her; she closes her eyes, waiting for his lips. The Kiss: an allegory of love, reproduced from poster to pencil case…
Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A story that engages throughout, only to falter in its resolution, will often be duly lamented; a novel that picks apart the conventions it adapts…
“Something that starts soon and looks good.” “Okay, so what’s the plot?” Anybody who has ever recommended any work of fiction has surely been hit with this question, likely quite immediately following one of their suggestions. It’s a fair inquiry, too: most people who engage with art need…
Since the release of his first short film, Heroes Never Die, 35 years ago, Alain Guiraudie has gradually built a reputation as one of world cinema’s most interesting, idiosyncratic talents. In 2001, he released two medium-length films, Sunshine for the Poor and That Old Dream That Moves, the…
As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap hotel room, dollar bills on the floor, the blinds closed; not asleep, though, but just lying in the dark; brooding; ready to get up…
Desert of Namibia At first, Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what this writer is calling Millennium Mambo-core, after the growing yet too-belated canonization of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 classic. In these films, beautiful yet disaffected youths stumble through romantic hardships in a…
In a landscape crowded with thrillers about obsession and celebrity, Jimmy Warden’s Borderline tries to carve out its own space, mixing ‘90s nostalgia, dark humor, and psychological tension into a chaotic night of pop-infused terror. At the center is Sofia (Samara Weaving), a music idol whose fame catches…