Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a more reflexive potential for contemporary practitioners of the former to acknowledge and appreciate the stealthy role of narrative organization in structuring moral reality.…
In Alice Lowe’s first feature since Prevenge in 2016, which announced the actress and writer as a talented director to boot, we are witness to an epic romantic saga of unrequited love through the ages, a time loop of reincarnated passion being placed in all the wrong places.…
In Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play two of the best snipers in the world representing, respectively, the superpowers of the West and East. They’ve been assigned to a year-long rotation manning guard towers overlooking a mist-covered valley several thousand meters across and possibly…
Like every other movie in the franchise, Michael Morris’ fourth installment, Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy, begins with a prologue delivered by Bridget Darcy (Renée Zellweger), née Jones. Before the opening credits roll, we are introduced to two significant deaths in Bridget’s life that establish the film’s…
Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of a trampoline, considering their impending adulthood and lamenting the endless griefs that come with age. After Jasmine, AKA Jazzy, fires off a list…
At its moment of most shine, CollegeHumor was perhaps the ubiquitous Internet content for a certain demo of Internet users. From the vantage of 2025, it’s likely difficult for most to recall the level of cultural cachet the company once held — does anyone even remember that Vimeo…
Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark — director and famed producer of numerous classics, including but not limited to Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and Zu Warriors (2001), Peking Opera Blues, the Once Upon a Time in China and Swordsman series,…
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…