At first glance, it wouldn’t be unfair to view My Old Ass, the new feature from Canadian actress-turned-director Megan Park, as a bit of a left turn. Park’s previous film, The Fallout (which won the Feature Competition Jury Award at SXSW 2021), was a partially somber exploration of…
Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that the filmmakers are, in fact, actively cognizant about criticism as a practice and the importance of criticism in representing a baseline of intellectually engaged…
Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a young Mexican teenager’s miserable journey from his home country to the the miserable existence of a Los Angeles sweatshop — tries its damnedest to…
In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels devoid of context for the viewer. Though seemingly calm and collected, Sano’s behaviour breaks with the social order. He asks the young boy about…
In 2002, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to a storm of controversy, eclipsed — for better or worse — only by Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible that year. The controversy bespoke radicality, and that radicality remains till this day: from its premise (two corporations…
From HAL’s unrelenting utilitarianism to Demon Seed’s Proteus longing for physical form beyond its servers to Margeaux’s desire to understand humans completely by murdering them in different ways, there’s a long line of films in which a purportedly helpful artificial intelligence oversteps and becomes dangerous to humans. On…
Hero is one of the great films by one of the world’s most brilliant image-makers in Zhang Yimou, shot by one of the world’s most attuned and adaptive cinematographers in Christopher Doyle, and stars more than a smattering of the most (justly) recognizable faces in Chinese cinema with…
At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a parable about toothpaste, its tube, and the impossibility of getting the fated gel back inside once it’s been squeezed out. “Words can’t be taken…
The dying days of French colonial rule are given ironically youthful life in Robin Campillo’s Red Island. Set in the early 1970s in Madagascar, the film envisions the end of an empire from the innocent, fragmented perspective of young Thomas, who lives on base with his family and…
This critic has often compared Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon’s films to the work of Jacques Tati, but in their latest film, The Falling Star, what strikes the viewer is how much it feels like something out of the Aki Kaurismäki universe. Abel and Gordon, a real-life married…
Nathan Silver is perhaps best known for his prodigious output, releasing nine feature films period of 2012 to 2019. His prolificness is made all the more impressive by the conditions under which his films have typically been made: microbudgets; international productions; structural scriptments with dialogue written the day…
“Our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve and how they see us the rest of our lives.” The new documentary Daughters opens with these introductory words, spoken by Angela Patton, the film’s co-director (alongside Natalie…
First things first: it will be important to remember, going forward, that John Woo’s 2024 movie The Killer, despite being a remake of his 1989 film The Killer, is, beyond some details of narrative, not remotely the same movie. It’s also not remotely as good, but that would…
At it’s best, Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us manages to evoke Stephen King’s It. Based on Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, the film begins in the small fictional town of Plethora, Maine. A drone shot introduces us to the landscape of King’s home state, where…
Marx’s vampires and specters; the oil crisis, Vietnam War, and industrializing slaughterhouses as the background for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the commodification of the spectacularly traumatic at Jupiter’s Claim and beyond in Nope — horror and capitalism have long been and remain in frequent conversation, to say the least.…
With 2024 marking the arrival of their eighth co-directed feature (with a couple additional co-director credits going to daughter Zelda in recent efforts), the projects of husband-wife duo John Adams and Toby Poser (known collectively as The Adams Family) have been improving in quality and increasing in visibility…
Drowning Dry Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed promise, but became a bit exhausting since it seemed that the director had one single idea — rage as a substitute…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of proving that bolsters the act of believing and allots evil its due place in the order of things. For atheists, or those in-between, the…
Despite being active for roughly five decades, with a handful of theatrical and television works within his filmography — including his 1980 debut To Love the Damned and 2003’s six-hour magnum opus The Best of Youth — the 73-year-old Milanese filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana still holds a quite…
Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age sensibilities of Levan Akin’s And Then we Danced and his more recent Crossing are a far cry from Lea Kulumbegashbili’s harrowing Beginning, for example.…