Our third and final dispatch from the 2019 BFI London Film Festival is offers thoughts on one of the upcoming awards season’s biggest players — Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood — as well as a litany of small, international fare, including: 2019 fall festival circuit…
Johnny Jewel’s music is imbued with an eldritch air of nostalgia, the coupling of retro synth-pop and filmic ambiance bringing to mind images of a late night drive along a caliginous road; his production gleams like a rain-slick street, and the recalcitrant synth lines and guitar riffs buzz…
The corrupt progress of global capitalism is and has been an inevitability for the past half century, its footprint visible in the bruises mottling the surface of society and making vulnerable all but the ultra-monied elite. The Laundromat takes aim at this reality and hopes its righteous fury…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online’s new monthly feature devoted…
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,…
There aren’t enough filmmakers, perhaps, still afraid of Virginia Woolf. Tina Gharavi, whose film I Am Nasrine was smuggled out of Tehran before being nominated for a BAFTA, and who helmed Cleopatra’s portions of the controversial Netflix docu-series African Queens produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, has had her…
Before beginning production on Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock invited screenwriter Arthur Laurents to dinner with his wife Alma. The film’s star, Farley Granger, with whom Laurents was in a relationship, was also invited, and Laurents assumed that other members of the cast (John Dall, Jimmy Stewart, etc.) would…
After Latvia became the first Baltic country to win an Academy Award with Flow in 2025, Conan O’Brien joked, “Ball’s in your court, Estonia!” The innocent omission of Lithuania, the region’s most populous country and thus theoretically most likely to actually produce an Oscar-worthy film, left Lithuanians on…
It’s been 30 years since we lost Jon Jost. One shouldn’t worry: the American director is still alive and well, living, working, painting, traveling, and occasionally blogging. We have lost Jost not as a person, but as a relevant filmmaker: nobody talks about his new films, no major…
A life sentence would seem to afford you a good deal of thinking time. But for Akutsu, a former yakuza facing his last days on earth in a cell, prison is anything but quiet. Akutsu does his time with Hōsenka, a smartassed talking balsam plant who cracks one-liners…
Love takes miles. In 1977, PK Mahanandia, a 23-year-old street artist living in Delhi, met the girl he was sure he was destined to marry. Lotta Von Schedvin was a young Swedish tourist drawn to PK’s portrait stand under a spell of curiosity and serendipity; 10 minutes and…
i. Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy It was Thymoetes, erstwhile soothsayer, who first took to that almighty horse. Hooves aloft, eyes heavenward, an attractive centerpiece to the Trojan municipality, he said, if positioned before the Pergamum in the midst of the city. As he described…
“An ode to cinema” — an audacious claim with which to open one’s feature, but audacity courses through the work of Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. He’s as qualified as any contemporary director to characterize his film as such, an artist to whom future cinematic odes may justly…
“As Rotterdam burns, they study Sanskrit verb forms,” is how one iteration of the famous proverb goes. This version of the maxim targets scholars with their vitriolic blind eye to injustice. How to Divorce During the War, the year’s biggest Lithuanian film and Sundance award-winning drama, is a…
Shatara Michelle Ford is one of the unsung forces in American Independent cinema. Their debut feature, Test Pattern, was a quiet yet seismic announcement of a voice with so much to say and exactly how to say it. Following a Black woman who’s been assaulted as she and…
A staid frostiness envelops the frames of Florin Şerban’s smoldering latest feature, whose clinching of the top prize at its Locarno premiere serves as an almost reactionary vindication of the haunted psychological portraitures that have, of late, seemingly gone out of fashion. In particular, as the auteurial specter…
The appeal of the legend lies less, as one might think, in its relatability to mortal affairs, but precisely in its sublime, eternal otherness where it comes alive, unsettling the listener with tales regaled of elemental force and purity. It is the space of belief between elements and…