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…
The year before he starred in Witness — Peter Weir’s acclaimed drama about a cop sent to protect a young Amish boy who witnesses a murder in a train station bathroom (a traumatic first journey out of his hermetic vicinage) that became the eighth-highest grossing film of 1985…
Pavements “The world’s most important and influential band breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” Thus begins Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, establishing from the jump the veins of both puckishness and earnestness that will run through this atypical, asymmetrical portrait of early-’90s indie rock wunderkinds Pavement. And…
In Sandro Aguilar’s 2015 short film, Undisclosed Recipients, two lovers meet at the Paredes de Coura Festival in Portugal. The night is a liquid black, lights and faces and bodies moving through the space. There’s a kiss, then another. It’s a film of darkness and desire, a deepening…
While production houses continue to mine disparate art forms for content, the question of how to transpose the art of one medium onto another often evades their grasp. Such empty regurgitation without engagement with the source art form exists only to provide exoticizing spectacles that, more often or…
Blazing Fists I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of funerals, and the other was Blazing Fists, Takashi Miike’s kickboxing movie. The surprise, then, is that only one of them made…
Filmed almost entirely on location in the dense forests of Sikkim, the northeasternmost state of India, Bhargav Saikia’s Bokshi is a wildly ambitious debut feature, mixing folk horror, a teenage coming-of-age story, Sam Raimi-esque splatter, and intimations of post-#MeToo feminist allegory into one overflowing stew. It’s a film…
A cause celebre the moment the trailer was released, Bad Girl prompted attacks on its more famous producer, the director Vetrimaaran, for portraying oppression in a Brahmin household and not among other castes. Those following politics in India will know that this is nothing new, for a considerable…
Yasuko, Songs of Days Past Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be profitable in the late ‘70s: the Roman porno genre. His young compatriots at the company saw artistic opportunity…
Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be profitable in the late ‘70s: the Roman porno genre. His young compatriots at the company saw artistic opportunity in the freedom this studio…
William Tell is at once large and small. It is an ambitious adaptation of 19th-century theatre, and it is a bloodthirsty action movie; it is a European independent film, but it feels like an American blockbuster. And I’m tempted to say that, despite being a bad film, William Tell…
To director Tommaso Santambrogio, to tell a story about people, you ought to tell the story of the places they inhabit. That could be why he favors long and wide static shots in his debut feature, Oceans are the Real Continents. The film, an expansion of the 2019…
Den of Thieves, 2018’s Dad Movie par excellence, came out of nowhere to capture the imaginations of brows high, low, and middle with equal appeal. Some saw its story of blurred lines between cop and robber as merely a grimier, grittier L.A. crime saga in the vein of…
How does one engage critically with Companion, a film whose chief attribute and function is as a plot twist delivery machine? Even its very premise is merely hinted at in the film’s marketing and doesn’t begin to reveal itself until the end of the first act, with everything…
If simplicity forms the premise of Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s Love Me, subtlety, however, is the last thing to constitute its payoff. Taking a gamut of tropes and running them through an equally variegated medley of possible scenarios, the film not only fails to convey the breadth of…
Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel are a contemporary duo whose work rebukes and inquires into the reactionary, philosophical response to an accelerated technological development, rendering posthumanist sympathies that in themselves are reflexive and articulate of technocratic fears. They are artists who seek to instigate the nu-materiality of digital…
An improbable 14 films in, and the Star Trek franchise has finally delivered its first truly unwatchable feature film. It’s difficult to think of a previous low that even approaches this level of low in the tenured body of the series, and even those who come to Star…
Admittedly light on story, Rose, a directorial debut from actress Aurélie Saada, is more of a cultural celebration than the straightforward story of aging sexuality (in the vein of Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria) it is sold as. Thoroughly dedicated to the director’s Jewish roots, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic, whether…
I was driving to see the cinema’s latest love story and stopped at a red light. On an empty street, on a cloudless night, I found myself making a U-turn. It wasn’t just that I sensed the indie I was going to was factory-made. It wasn’t that it…
A Note on Selection and Organization Criteria The films in our canon were categorized according to the year of their U.S. theatrical release and the distributor behind it — except in cases where a.) the time between the film’s international release and its U.S. one exceeded five years, or b.) the film never received any…