Set in the year 2019, An Unfinished Film is a fictional documentary about a film crew that reunites to finish a queer feature from 10 years ago. There are many reasons not to revive the project, as the film’s former lead Jiang Chen (Qin Hao) points out. An…
Independent American filmmaking in the 1970s features many showcases of distinctive actor-director relationships. One of them: Joan Micklin Silver and her many great actors, including Peter Riegert. Riegert went from losing a role in Silver’s Between the Lines, to a supporting role in Chilly Scenes of Winter, and…
Suspended Time Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been deemed “minor.” It’s true, Suspended Time is resolutely, even defiantly, small-scaled, a time capsule of a very recent past that people…
In a concise opening, Thierry de Peretti’s In His Own Image introduces its heroine Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo), a young and passionate photographer who seems to be, despite her commitment to her work (here shown taking pictures of newlyweds), somewhat troubled and melancholic. Specifically, there’s the sense of inner…
The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and Lena (Josefa Heinsius), acclimate themselves to speaking in each other’s native languages over the course of the film, yet as their relationship deepens,…
Someone inside one of the UK’s intelligence agencies has stolen a device that could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and sold it to the enemy, but that’s of almost secondary concern to all the bed-hopping and backstabbing between romantic partners in Steven Soderbergh’s…
There have been many movies about baseball, that most American of sports — it is axiomatic. They can be nostalgic, romantic, or even, increasingly, tech-inflected (aka Moneyball, stats, archiving via aggregate). It’s fitting that America’s Pastime would reflect changes in the socio-political landscape of the country; sports have…
Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France; The Tempest in Sycorax. Of course, these are not straightforward adaptations, and Piñeiro uses these plays instead…
Henry Fonda for President Thoughtful film curation asks us to consider films in a new light. Alexander Horwath knows this better than most, having served as director of the Vienna International Film Festival and the Austrian Film Museum during the last thirty-plus years. His Henry Fonda for President,…
In the Mouth In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to a surreal buddy comedy to a sentimental drama. It follows the hermetic Merl (Colin Burgess), a young man who refuses…
Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with its black-and-white photography and consciously naturalistic dialogue, the film is a throwback to another era, a time (perhaps the last) when filmmakers could…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a more reflexive potential for contemporary practitioners of the former to acknowledge and appreciate the stealthy role of narrative organization in structuring moral reality.…
In Alice Lowe’s first feature since Prevenge in 2016, which announced the actress and writer as a talented director to boot, we are witness to an epic romantic saga of unrequited love through the ages, a time loop of reincarnated passion being placed in all the wrong places.…
In Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play two of the best snipers in the world representing, respectively, the superpowers of the West and East. They’ve been assigned to a year-long rotation manning guard towers overlooking a mist-covered valley several thousand meters across and possibly…
Like every other movie in the franchise, Michael Morris’ fourth installment, Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy, begins with a prologue delivered by Bridget Darcy (Renée Zellweger), née Jones. Before the opening credits roll, we are introduced to two significant deaths in Bridget’s life that establish the film’s…
Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of a trampoline, considering their impending adulthood and lamenting the endless griefs that come with age. After Jasmine, AKA Jazzy, fires off a list…
At its moment of most shine, CollegeHumor was perhaps the ubiquitous Internet content for a certain demo of Internet users. From the vantage of 2025, it’s likely difficult for most to recall the level of cultural cachet the company once held — does anyone even remember that Vimeo…
Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark — director and famed producer of numerous classics, including but not limited to Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and Zu Warriors (2001), Peking Opera Blues, the Once Upon a Time in China and Swordsman series,…
It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the person reading this review right now has never heard of Edward Burns, let alone seen any of his films. Coming just a year after the wild success of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, Burns’ The Brothers McMullen was the triumph of the 1995 Sundance Film Festival,…
Why do we even watch this movie in the first place? This is one of those scary movies, isn’t it? For years we hear about it, then one day realize we’re actually allowed to watch it. So we put it on. Oh, it’s Godard. We know what to…