After thwarting the terrorist takeovers of both Washington, D.C. in Olympus Has Fallen and in London, in — naturally — London Has Fallen, legendary Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) returns. And if the title here is meant to make any sense whatsoever, it’s Banning himself who…
Although a bit of a scaling down from his previous tech-heavy outings, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is nothing if not a fully realized vision: a deeply felt black and white love letter to the director’s youth, and more specifically, to the young maid who raised him. But the film lacks much…
An unfulfilled housewife drifts away from her mannered husband by selling her body whenever he’s away in Sion Sono’s Guilty of Romance—a film that seems in conversation with Luis Buñuel’s classic Belle de Jour. As with his forebear, the central transgression Sono is after is the wandering sex life of an ostensibly monogamous woman,…
Chaos reigns in Yasuhiro Aoki’s anarchic, wildly imaginative feature directorial debut ChaO, a whirlwind exploration of the breadth of storytelling potential in animated film. Almost assaultively vibrant in its bright colors, fast pace, fantastical elements, and bold disregard for conventional narrative style and structure, it’s a somewhat disorienting…
In the last decade or two, it often feels like action comedy speaks one language. You can blame Ryan Reynolds if you’d like, or maybe it goes further back to Joss Whedon. Whoever you want to throw the book at, it hardly matters. The point is that we’ve…
A man emerges from the forest, destitute. We follow him as he shambles through the streets, parks, hills, and graveyards of Cluj-Napoca. It’s his last day on earth. When Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) wakes up the next morning in his makeshift home — the boiler room of a building…
In just a few short years, it’s been a thrill to watch Alice Maio Mackay’s ascension. From her debut feature, So Vam, to Carnage For Christmas, Mackay has created an entire ecosystem to herself. Her dreamy, hypnotic visions of a world where trans and queer love can thrive…
As of this writing, filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay turned 21 less than a week ago. She has also just premiered her sixth feature length film in the last four years, a remarkably sustained run of productivity, regardless of age. Unbeholden to studios and working with micro-budgets, Mackay does…
Marc Jacobs is everywhere. In Marc by Sofia — the Sofia of the title being Coppola — the Lost in Translation director makes a case for her longtime friend and collaborator as a monolith of American ubiquity. His designs channel Old Hollywood and straddle the forefront of international…
Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid isn’t shy about his disgust toward his home country. A body of work examining Israel with a sense of frustration and sadness, Lapid is one of the few artists from the Zionist nation willing to unspool the darkness at its center. With his latest,…
An 11-minute standing ovation at Cannes can’t be called a total disaster. Nevertheless, Alpha arrived at the 2025 London Film Festival trailing a, shall we say, less-than-enthusiastic critical response. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Palme d’Or winner Titane is a film swollen with ideas, ambitious to the point of…
Released in 1978 in what was then Czechoslovakia, Beauty and the Beast by director Juraj Herz follows a young woman who, to save her father, agrees to live in the castle of a feared creature, isolated by the local community. In a ruined space that seems suspended between…
Jessie Buckley’s hesitant recitation of Bonedog — the achingly painful poem written by Eva H.D. — is one of the most memorably harrowing sequences in Charlie Kaufman’s already memorably harrowing I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The actress’s flat, almost affectless vocal performance doesn’t match her very obviously depressed…
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 Koberidze, whose…
The mainstream romantic drama matters. Movies on the artier end of the spectrum — Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Phantom Thread — have endured and (rather quickly) entered the canon. But for every Before Trilogy there’s also an About Time,…
Two Pianos In an old interview with David Ehrlich, filmmaker and critic Kent Jones recalls a conversation with Arnaud Desplechin in which the great French director told him “a script is a very small thing. The movie is the thing.” It's a wonderfully succinct summation of Desplechin's interests as an artist; there's always a story,
A suspicious disappearance of a teenage girl in a small town on the Côte d’Azur sends a young woman searching and spiraling in the Cartesian truth drama Affection Affection. It’s the winter season, and the picturesque little town is troubled by minor mysteries, from a missing white puppy…
Eight Bridges James Benning is a master of moments. Over a career that spans five decades and twice as many modal deviations, Benning abstracts the American Problem through cinematic experiments as alienating as they are precise. To label the director’s films “slow cinema” would be to imply too…
Howard Wiseman’s self-described “quasi-history” of dark age Britain, Then Arthur Fought: The Matter of Britain, is an account of the historical material — matières, as the original French classification of medieval heroic tales goes — that has been, over the centuries, reconfigured as romance, legend, and myth in…
Succeeding the opening text of Amilcar is a close-up on a man’s face depicted in ultra-slow speed, soon revealed as interview footage, amidst a disorienting sound design. He wears a pair of angular spectacles and turns his gaze away from the camera. He dons a puzzled and pensive…