All We Imagine As Light “This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening montage of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Clément Pinteaux’s jump-cut editing and Ranabir Das’ mobile camerawork…
One of the more amazing things about returning to Rosemary’s Baby after its release decades ago, or even watching it for the first time since one’s teenage years, is how little it telegraphs itself as a horror movie. It’s not simply that it’s a slow-burn horror film; rather,…
“You know what’s wrong with America, don’t you? It’s the light,” Hank rants to his buddy. “It’s all tinsel, it’s all phony bullshit, man. Nothing’s real!” An understandable sentiment coming from a man who lives on the edge of Las Vegas, that great monument to fakery — a…
There are three kinds of transportation that dominate cinema: the horse, the car, and the train. Each of these has its romance and its landscape. The horse represents total freedom. It can be ridden on any terrain; it can take its rider into the vast unknown. In the…
Is there anything new to say about The Godfather? This might have been a worthwhile question even very shortly after it came out. The recent online brouhaha surrounding the A.I.-generated Pauline Kael pans in the trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis offers a clue as to how quickly…
Robert Beavers’ 18-film cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure, comprising the majority of both his filmography and a recent 25-film retrospective of his work at Anthology Film Archives, begins with just that. The film Early Monthly Segments opens with a bombast of images…
After several festival dates in 2023, Simon Barrett and E.L. Katz’s Azrael seemed to fall off the face of the Earth. Given the current state of the industry, with steamers and corporations dumping fully completed projects for tax breaks, there was genuine concern that Azrael would go the…
“Someone’s inside.” These two words, uttered with ominous clarity, spur Jason Yu’s invigorating debut, Sleep, into malevolent and mysterious somnolence; for in the world of dreams, what exactly constitutes “inside” isn’t quite established. For young couple Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun), their cozy apartment in suburban…
Awaara was restored in 4K by the National Film Archive of India (NFDC) under National Film Heritage Mission, a project undertaken by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. This restoration screened at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival, marking the centenary of Raj Kapoor, often…
Aaron Schimberg’s third feature, A Different Man, is a genre-bending character portrait of Edward (Sebastian Stan, wearing a prosthetic mask), a lonely and failed actor disfigured by neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition referred to as “NF1.” Unable to assert himself romantically with his boorish playwright neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve),…
A short 15 years ago, in a(n almost) post-Harry Potter world, it looked as if the young adult SFF wave was poised to be the surest movie star-making mill to arise in some time. This seemed, for a brief moment, particularly true for young actresses, with Kristen Stewart…
“We don’t want to scare people,” a director says at the beginning of Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man. It’s the set of a workplace educational film on facial deformities and Edward (Sebastian Stan), an actor with elephant man-like neurofibromatosis, is playing a co-worker in distress whose loud moans…
All Shall Be Well opens with a leisurely, near-fantastical tour through what appears to be a typical 24 hours for Angie (Patra Au) and Pat (Li Lin-Lin), the middle-aged lesbian couple at the center of Ray Yeung’s latest film. Not only are they excellent hosts with a perfect…
Tamil star Dhanush has worked with a bounty of the industry’s most daring artists: Vetrimaaran, Karthik Subbaraj, not to mention his brother Selvaraghavan, always as an elusive and potent presence. Dhanush’s suave menace in Vada Chennai (2018) or the vicious tragedy of his performance in Asuran (2019) are…
Among the boldest of the great Argentine films that emerged at the start of the 2000s was Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut La Libertad, a film about a woodcutter going about his day that was most notable for what it didn’t do. Our protagonist simply went about his daily…
Anora 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…
As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts them, to varying degrees, in his sophomore feature, Sad Jokes. Stumm plays Joseph, a filmmaker in the development trenches for his next film, who…
The title card hovers over an image of trolley tracks rushing toward the camera. A lulling piano serenades the words Passing Strangers, both heralded and undercut by painted letters on concrete spelling “KEEP OUT.” These dual sensations of momentum and trepidation are front and center in Arthur J.…
Babygirl Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic in the year of our lord 2024, and it’s listened to all of Karina Longworth’s podcasts on the disappearance of the erotic thriller.…
Neorealist drama Bicycle Thieves said so much about our human condition and the struggle to rise above one’s dire circumstances that its main concept of a man going through hardship in post-World War II Italy can be effectively transposed to contexts pertaining to any number of our current…