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…
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…