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,…
Allow me to posit a cinephilic contention: that cinema is perhaps the most formally complete of all art forms — or rather, a blistering confection of each: photography, performance, music, design, technology, to name only a few. And yet one could simultaneously argue that cinema is, above all…
At first glance, Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline is the sort of film online cinephiles love to bemoan “they don’t make anymore,” a grounded crime thriller for adults, free of the confines of IP branding, that stars beautiful people and a healthy but not gratuitous amount of sex.…
Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under her belt — clearly plays in a different league. In the literal sense, too, as the Dickinson-Johannsson-Stewart trio has been given lovely and…
I observe a Dry January most years. Usually, I drink to a moderate level, and prefer alcohol as a sedative rather than as a party enhancement. But while I do not have a problem with substance abuse, I admittedly do relate to the drunk novelist archetype. There are…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: after witnessing the senseless slaughter of her parents, a young woman barely escapes with her life and trains to become a professional assassin in order to exact vengeance on her family’s killers. It’s a tried and true recipe that has…
“His parents were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall struck its uniform beat, the wind whistled by the rattling windows; the room was periodically brightened by the gleam of the moon. The youth lay restlessly in his bed and thought about the stranger and…
Cannes seems to have settled into a kind of violent habit: slotting a promising film by a female auteur into its tail end. This year’s scheduling felt especially ruthless, specifically with regard to Valeska Grisebach, who piqued critical interest with her Un Certain Regard breakout Western (2017), and…
Passenger starts with a prayer. “Carry me safely to my destined place, like you carried Christ in your close embrace,” ends the prayer to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. It’s hard to say how seriously Tyler (Jacob Scipio) takes his faith, but he cherishes his sterling…
Yukiko Sode’s slice-of-life epic All the Lovers in the Night clocks in at just under two and a half hours, but feels far more alive than that daunting runtime might suggest. Centered on an extremely shy woman, Fukuko (Yukino Kishii), who works as a freelance proofreader, Sode patiently…
Maddening as it is that the middlebrow (leaning low) fodder of yesteryear continues to serve as a lightning rod for conservative megacorporations eager to cash in on nostalgia well into the second half of the 2020s, it’s a fact that those of us who continue to care about…
For the first time in his feature career, Cristian Mungiu has shifted his critical gaze from Romania to its western neighbors. A Cannes luminary par excellence — the recipient of the Palme d’Or for startling abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and awarded twice…
The gifted prodigy who’s gone to seed is a time-honored trope that will never leave us because it flatters both filmmakers and actors. A streetwise rogue who can quote Dostoevsky or play Rachmaninoff may only exist in the realm of fantasy, but it’s catnip for actors (almost always…
Sometimes the first shot of a film tells you enough to know you’re in the hands of a great director. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown — so far the genuine standout of this year’s Cannes competition — opens on such a note, with an awkwardly framed hyper-digital POV shot…
Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead as far as Dan . . . Then the Lord said to him, “This is the…
A monkey’s paw-inspired horror film that’s not-so-secretly about the loss of free will and specifically women being subjugated by their partners, Obsession — from 26-year-old YouTube creator-turned-feature filmmaker Curry Barker — is the latest in a line of films that ostensibly interrogates the idea of being a self-professed…
While possessing the backdrop and aesthetics of a social realist drama, the narrative foundation of writer-director Pierre Le Gall’s debut feature Flesh and Fuel takes a more classical form: the love story. Set in the world of long-haul trucking in France, with attention to the rote details and…
Not Arthur Rimbaud, but A. Rimbaud. The title of Patrick Wang’s latest film is the skeleton key that unlocks the principles behind its approach to the usually deadly writer biopic. The figure at its center, played by Blake Draper in his second film role, is a version (and…