The title character of Sean Baker’s Anora notably does not go by that name for most of the film, and appears uncomfortable when male characters tell her how pretty her birth name is. In fact, Mikey Madison’s character prefers to be called Ani, and it plays into the…
Brad Dourif, known for his madman characters and many cinematic iniquities, is, it’s easy to forget, capable of staggering eclecticism. His career, unimpeachable, daring, perfectly weird, is based on an non-judgmental approach. He’s taken the shape of men both strange and normal, believable and absurd, painfully human and…
The title of A24’s newest tragicomic offering, We Live in Time, recalls the gleeful cliché of romance films from the decade past: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), About Time (2013), Time Freak (2018), and, more recently, Needle in a Timestack (2021). The title of John Crowley’ latest entry…
It’s possible to make the claim that, from a certain point in his career, the works of the veteran (and outcast) Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov have emplaced the notion of history as their main focal fascination, at least in a more explicit sense. History, in its grander discursive…
Rumours Since his out-of-nowhere debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital in 1988, Winnipeg-based director Guy Maddin has become synonymous with a very particular brand of cinema, a body of work so unique and axiomatic that, were his films more widely known, they would have by now settled…
Revolving Rounds In Johann Lurf’s thrilling 2019 film Cavalcade, a 35mm camera records an apparent long take of a six-foot phenakistoscope water wheel constructed by Lurf. Lit by a strobe light, the device spins, kicks up water, and induces a trancelike frenzy of animation, as the camera’s 35mm…
It’s been hard for me to describe Jinho Myung’s debut feature Softshell (2024) ever since it premiered at New/Next Film Festival on the first weekend of October. The logline I’d reach for is too basic: a half-Thai brother and sister navigate early adulthood in New York City in…
One approaches the release of Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice with equal parts morbid curiosity and dread. Mired in what was almost certainly expected controversy since its premiere at this past spring’s Cannes Film Festival — including toothless threats of lawsuits, a lukewarm reception from skittish distributors, and even…
As with all great films, crime dramas, at their best, are much more than the machinations of their dense plots. Some of these films contain a forbidden allure, one that allows us to revel in the criminals’ utter disregard for the norms of respectable society, before our moralizing…
The Room Next Door Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language films have operated in a particularly confessional mode. Featuring The Room Next Door’s co-star Tilda Swinton, his 2020 short film The Human Voice artfully charts its protagonist’s soul-bearing degeneration. His 2023 short film Strange Way of Life sees Pedro…
Blink, the new film from the team behind 2022 Oscar-winner Navalny, justifies its existence from the start; a documentary about children losing their vision demands nothing less than the treatment of a visual medium. Mia, Colin, and Laurent, three of the four children of Edith Lemay and Sébastien…
Eephus At first, Eephus holds the potential to make one quite sad. For this writer, the effect did not seem intentional and was more about my response to the film. It’s a movie about men playing their last amateur baseball game on their local field before it gets…
A young American wanders around Buenos Aires, looking for the grave of the famed pirate Hippolyte Bouchard, who once conquered the American’s hometown of Monterey, California, for a couple of days. The trip goes awry when the American gets robbed and loses his wallet, his passport, his money.…
Scénarios The last image of Jean-Luc Godard’s last film Scénarios is one of the most heartbreaking in his long, storied, notorious, glorious, defining, essential career. It is of Godard sitting on his bed, his shirt open, taking notes on a film he will never make. “Okay,” says a…
How do you conjure a spectacle as a mere man? Real spectacle, the kind that rivals the infinite colorful vistas of the Northern Lights or the deep terror of a thunderstorm, is the product of God, nature, and Hollywood. Meanwhile, independent movies are the realm of either cheaper…
You might remember the 2019 movie sensation Joker. Todd Phillips, the guy who made the Hangovers, directed an allegedly searing portrait of mental illness, thwarted masculinity, and society in collapse all subversively under the aegis of the legendary Batman villain. It culminated in Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker/Arthur Fleck shooting…
“What is time except to curve past and present around us?” Cesar Catiina (Adam Driver) asks the January 6-coded throng demanding his Megalopolis be destroyed. Much like Megalopolis (2024) itself, it’s a question posed as universal and yet only really scrutable at a hyper-personal level. Catiina is the “visionary…
Twixt (2011) closes the gap between Francis Ford Coppola’s Corman-produced horror debut, Dementia 13 (1963), and his 21st-century excursions into low-budget experimentation, Youth Without Youth (2007) and Tetro (2009). In many ways, Coppola’s late-career films form an aesthetic and thematic triptych, not least because director of photography Mihai…
Not much is said about the blemishes of an auteur’s career, especially if they prove to be wholly uncharacteristic of its maker’s blueprint. Idiosyncratic in their design and with little, save for the director’s credit, to associate them with the latter’s pet themes and obsessions, these anomalies provide,…
Cinema’s obsessions with images are the result of its propensity for their proliferation: although literature tempts the wayward imagination, cinema is what drives it truly crazy, instantiating orgiastic visions of sex and death without rendering their reality bare to the observer. This is, of course, a metaphysical claim;…