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,…
I once carpooled from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to my small hometown in Northeast Ohio with a stranger. She was an attractive woman two grades above me who had a car and happened to be a Calvin student from the same Ohio town. Circumstances alone brought…
One day, noticing an influx of dust into their apartment due to some construction outside, a person known only as an “academic ladyboy” (as they call themselves and are credited on IMDb) buys a new vacuum cleaner. It seems to work well, but that night the vacuum coughs…
“Look out Mama, there’s a white boat coming up the river!” — Neil Young, “Powderfinger” It’s the sound of waves parting, or maybe an atom splitting. It could be the sound of the beginning and the end of the universe collapsed into one. It’s not the…
It is tempting, in times like these, to ascribe to an archetype its particular incarnation, to historicize it one way or another. Such might be the tendency for toxic masculinity of late, as its critics and fanatics alike clamor to mine metaphor out of mere expression. Sometimes these…
There’s little to say about Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows that hasn’t already been said. Like any great film, it’s animated by an internal lifeforce that wills it to stay open to interpretations and applications from audiences of any time period. Similarly, one person’s experience of the…
2025 is the year of the teeter-totter. We teeter on the first half of the decade, defined by death and the uninhibited embrace of a digital world, and totter on the second half, defined, so far, by malfeasance in all sectors of public life across the globe. The…
Those inclined to immediately exit the theater or press stop on their remotes the instant a film concludes would do well to take a beat once the end credits of The Testament of Ann Lee begin. If not to acknowledge the work of the hundreds of people who…
2025 is the year of the teeter-totter. We teeter on the first half of the decade, defined by death and the uninhibited embrace of a digital world, and totter on the second half, defined, so far, by malfeasance in all sectors of public life across the globe. The…
2025 is the year of the teeter-totter. We teeter on the first half of the decade, defined by death and the uninhibited embrace of a digital world, and totter on the second half, defined, so far, by malfeasance in all sectors of public life across the globe. The…
Adapted from Freida McFadden’s BookTok sensation and starring two of Hollywood’s most in-demand blonde actresses in Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried (both of whom also appear in year’s end, would-be awards contenders), The Housemaid is a twist-filled, nasty bit of business that should be the stuff of irresistible…
2025 is the year of the teeter-totter. We teeter on the first half of the decade, defined by death and the uninhibited embrace of a digital world, and totter on the second half, defined, so far, by malfeasance in all sectors of public life across the globe. The…
We’re back on Pandora, which according to multiple credible reports, still ain’t Kansas. 2022’s The Way of Water proved that James Cameron’s richly imagined and immaculately realized alien world is a showcase not merely for the dazzling technical marvel on display, but for his ruthless ability to sweep…
Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured a singer, a composer, and now a standup comedian in his work. His latest, Is This Thing On? — a film brought to him by his friend,…
That George W. Bush’s war on terror was a farce is all but written history. The craven hunt for oil under the guise of WMDs resulted in over 940,000 casualties and drew enough bipartisan criticism to land as a talking point for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign; The…
One of the quirks of Lisa Jorgenson (Reese Witherspoon) in James L. Brooks’ 2010 film How Do You Know is a tendency to speak in pre-packaged pearls of wisdom, where one gets the impression that the structural integrity of her interior life is a neurotic composition of self-help…
The Old Man and His Car There is a good deal of sentimental value, both real and inflated, in Michael Kam’s The Old Man and His Car, most glaringly clued in by its titular reference to Hemingway. Sentiment and simplicity are a kindred pair, Kam seems to say,…
The concert film documents the ecstasies of performance; the biopic narrativizes its painstaking preparations. In between these two modes stands the rehearsal film, capturing the sensitivities of perspectives and personalities amid its crafting of the larger, all-encompassing purpose to which these individuals are devoted. True to form, Jac…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Chinese auteur Bi Gan has come to be lauded for his seductive and hypnotic cinematic form, a form inextricably fostered…
Michael Showalter, in the past decade, has parlayed his success as a comedic writer and performer into a career as a writer-director of audience-pleasing dramedies on film and television, representing microgenres from the prestige biopic to the age-gap romance, and often anchored by strong performances from seasoned actresses.…