Jay Kelly A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies to Noah Baumbach’s and Emily Mortimer’s remarkable screenplay for Jay Kelly. On paper, Baumbach’s thirteenth feature, about the end-of-career crisis of the…
Filmmaker, artist, and animator Virgilio Villoresi’s first feature, Orfeo, made after years of directing short films, advertisements, and music videos, is a whimsical, finely crafted creation; a mélange of vintage techniques, its interweaving of countless literary and cinematic references forms a film that is inarguably a product of…
“You tell me things I never found in Plato or Hegel.” Romantic expressions like this abound in Isiah Medina’s latest, Gangsterism, a film noir set in the seedy world of Canadian film grants and Spielberg apologists. The streets are adorned with Star Wars prequels posters, and, at any…
Since 1974, Troma Entertainment has enjoyed its position as the longest running independent film studio in the world, having been responsible for either the production or distribution of over 1,000 films. Nominally a horror-comedy studio, Troma’s collection largely consists of splattery B-movies and farcical send-ups of genre films…
Writing in the second issue of the Southeast Asian film magazine MARG1N, Singaporean wunderkind Yeo Siew Hua lamented the incongruence between filmic and lived reality, averring that insofar as “the acceleration of renewal surpasses the cementation of memory and identity,” what is eventually captured onscreen resembles “not so…
Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes begins with a corker of an opening shot. Predominantly taking place at adjoining apartment complexes in Marseille separated by a courtyard, the film sets the stage by having the camera hover weightlessly as it moves to-and-fro between the buildings in a long unbroken take, peering into…
While hardly the first to do it, Richard Linklater’s masterful execution of the walk-and-talk two-hander with 1995’s Before Sunrise ushered in a wave of similarly structured films that sought to capture the specific intimacy and hesitancy of a burgeoning potential relationship. In the years since that Linklater release,…
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. When Tony Tost’s Americana, a flyover country-set crime drama built around an interconnected ensemble, premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival, the film’s ostensible leading lady, Sydney Sweeney, was primarily known for being an ingénue/sexpot with a supporting role on…
Dry Leaf Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of competing and converging interests that, if they’re lucky, alights on the ground every few years in a distinct, feature-length form. Alexandre…
Obex One of the least consequential but more intriguing facets of our age of technology acceleration is watching which flavor of tech nostalgia will be the next to manifest. Take vinyl, for instance, which has made the long journey over only the last 40 years from dominant music-listening…
Blue Heron Sophy Romvari has used cinema to mine the fractured, seemingly incomplete nature of her family history since her first short film, Nine Behind. In that film and others, whatever pieces of physical archive might elude her, she makes up for in a rigorous but soulful exploration…
Entering Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, one is immediately faced with a decision. It’s a decision of considerable importance. Standing in the rotunda, one may either go forward, into the temporary exhibition, or right, into the curated beginning of the permanent collection, or left, into the midst of things. To take…
Flush Setting one’s low-budget genre film in a single setting is a time-honored tradition, a money-saving maneuver that makes for a simple calling-card exercise but which nonetheless requires a high level of ingenuity to pull off in any sort of satisfying way. It’s a testament to the skills…
The most reliable formula in action cinema today is having Ma Dong-seok one-punch a bunch of anonymous stuntmen into a wall. After hitting it big (so to speak) in 2016 with Train to Busan, the man also known as Don Lee has been brawling his way into our…
Originally released in 1980, Night of the Juggler bears all the trappings of an exceptional cult thriller, though it’s one that has never been terribly easy to find, due in part to the film’s lack of a proper DVD release. To celebrate its 45th anniversary, Night of the…
On paper, July was — and is usually — a month earmarked for studios to make their mint, with blockbusters of varying quality demanding half of multiplexes’ screens, including: James Gunn’s Superman (pretty decent), the introduction of the first official Fantastic Four entry into the MCU (a mediocre film…
You’re probably familiar. But in case you’re not, back in 1982, relatively fresh off the success of Airplane!, creators Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams (ZAZ, for short) pivoted to TV with the short-lived cop show parody Police Squad. It starred newly-minted comedy presence Leslie Nielsen (who’d…
It all begins as a ghost story in Portuguese filmmaker João Rosas’ feature debut The Luminous Life. Said ghost is a nameless woman who, as his best friend attests to protagonist Nicolau (played by Rosas’ long-time collaborator Francisco Melo), bears striking resemblance to his former girlfriend Inês (Margarida…
“You can’t be a spectator. You gotta take these dreams and make them whole.” After over a decade of releasing music, Pulp’s Different Class album brought the band the success they’d long aspired to, but the level of fame and tabloid scrutiny eventually soured the atmosphere for them.…
Together In Michael Shanks’ body-horror-comedy Together, the recently-engaged but longtime-dating couple of Millie and Tim (played by real-life spouses and frequent creative collaborators Alison Brie and Dave Franco) find themselves stranded in a mysterious, underground chamber after being caught in the rain while hiking in the woods. The…