Relay Director David Mackenzie has had a fascinating career; in the past, we’d likely consider him a talented journeyman, the sort of solid professional who can churn out good, if occasionally impersonal, work (these directors tend to gravitate toward prestige television nowadays). Some readers might recall Mackenzie’s stunning…
The author Hunter S. Thompson is widely credited with founding the “Gonzo journalism” movement, which is informally defined as incorporating subjective language and satire into immersive journalism. However, Thompson’s legend was equally burnished by his well-documented drug use, affinity for guns, and disdain for authority figures. It enshrined…
Fans of Nora Ephron be warned: Materialists has been grossly mismarketed. Fresh off the success of her Oscar-nominated Past Lives, it seemed puzzling that Celine Song would pivot to this mode of metropolitan dramedy over a decade past its expiry date. The premise is plucked straight from the…
There are filmmakers so dominant that you can detect their influence in the works of other filmmakers throughout the years, around the world — Ford, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Spielberg. It’s there in grand conceits and tiny motifs, in style, tone, structure, and plot, subtle here and overt there. And…
With an official title like From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, it seems like some kind of warning is being telegraphed. Spinning off one of the truly sui generis upstarts-turned-phenomena in recent action movie history just seems like a bad idea, a thing nobody asked for, without…
Most legacy sequels frustrate in their imprisonment to the original films. The character cameos, repeated iconic lines, and mystery linkages between the past and the present all make for an easy money grab, as time shows again and again, but they also explicitly bog the films down. The…
The Young Mothers Home Immersing yourself in a new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is akin to reluctantly catching up with an old friend. As of late, there’s something almost too familiar about the brothers’ tried and tested brand of social-realist cinema that mines the fringes of…
Peak Everything (or Amour Apocalypse, its easily translatable French title) is only Anne Émond’s second film to premiere internationally, following Our Loved Ones — easily her best film — which bowed at Locarno in 2015. What’s happened to Émond’s filmmaking in the decade since is a tale of…
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen in a flash of color, sparkle, and song. With no exposition, or even opening credits, the two women part a sheer, black-sequined curtain, decked out in matching sequined, crimson gowns with plunging necklines and crowned with red-and-white feathered caps…
On the most basic level, Graham Swon’s second feature, An Evening Song (for three voices), could be called a pre-war domestic melodrama, a gothic mystery, and a queer romance. But these are merely generic avenues by which Swon traverses an inquiry into disappearances, of people into thin air,…
In her feature-length directorial debut, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, writer-director Laura Piani effervescently manages the tricky task of bringing the deep emotionality and light comic touch of Jane Austen’s endlessly adapted novels into the context of a contemporary rom-com. The film centers Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford), a…
Eddington When the world turned to shit approximately five years ago, satire marched ahead, determined to outpace the banality of lived reality. Old-school broadcasts and appeals to reclaim the political center lacked the traction of identity politics, the ironic pizzazz of deep-fried memes, and the virulence of everyone…
Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under her belt — clearly plays in a different league. In the literal sense, too, as the Dickinson-Johannsson-Stewart trio has been given lovely and…
Josef von Sternberg always had a materialistic streak — it was a necessity to produce the kind of effects he was chasing. He never embraced it as excessively as he did with The Scarlet Empress, the penultimate entry in his seven-film cycle with Marlene Dietrich, and the one…
Sound of Falling Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of having lived otherwise — in another time or place, or in a manner less harshly consummated by regret or resentment.…
A white person adrift in an “exotic” land, losing themselves in order to find themselves in the perceived primitiveness, peculiarity, or freedom of their strange new locale. A whole world has thus been seen, rendered, and interpreted by European eyes throughout the history of cinema, from the overtly…
The titular girl of The Girl in the Snow, director Louise Hémon’s debut feature, appears repeatedly as a dark silhouette. Clad in a black cloak and hat against a blazingly white landscape — and often in a long shot obscuring her features — she stands in stark relief…
Across five feature films to date, most of which exist within a liminal space located between fiction and documentary narrative, demarcated with blurred lines, Roberto Minervini has engendered a number of comparisons. Sean Baker comes to mind if one is to look primarily at the subjects and subject…
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 drug- and electronic…
“I hate ’love’ in my own language,” says the Norwegian music artist and novelist Jenny Hval in the title track from her album The Practice of Love. “It contains the entire word honesty inside it, which makes it sound… purified. The word love comes in the way of…