A mother and daughter’s symbiotic bond fuels the artistic crucible that underlies Janet Planet. Such a description, let alone the title, might indicate a film that’s merely riding the coattails of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Fortunately, Annie Baker’s first foray into feature filmmaking is anything but derivative. The…
Jazzy Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of a trampoline, considering their impending adulthood and lamenting the endless griefs that come with age. After Jasmine, AKA Jazzy, fires off a…
To the uninitiated, techno music might feel forbiddingly sterile, lacking the warmth of familiar analog instruments or the collaborative dynamic of bandmates, songwriters, and producers. What’s more, the lone figure of the DJ, sequestered above and away from the dance floor, can seem both intimidatingly aloof and annoyingly…
It’s an awkward phase, that post-graduation purgatory where possibilities seem endless, endlessly limited, or both — or so I’m told, I never went to college myself — and the choice paralysis and more general anxiety that so often comes with navigating it provides a fairly convenient backdrop for…
From VR to AI and NFT, from Metaverse to cutting-edge computer games and interface technologies, it’s quite clear that both our existential and psychological states are so enormously affected that, perhaps, our entire perception of the world no longer has a stable baseline, but is instead locked into…
Nuked Imbued with plenty of allure and the potential for surprise, friendly get-togethers and familial gatherings in cinema sustain such an appeal that they never outright feel dusty or outmoded, and, on the contrary, still hold a special place for many contemporary indie dramedies. Despite financial practicalities that…
The playful vignettes of various cheesemongers, makers, and even competition judges in Ian Cheney’s Shelf Life are much like the dairy product itself — each a little different, some more enticing than others, but all delightful in their own way. Much like Cheney’s last film, The Arc of…
Since 2011, animator and director Don Hertzfeldt has focused on one topic: memory. In the tripartite It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the loss of memory is equated with the loss of personhood or death itself; in the World of Tomorrow trilogy, memories of dead people are injected into…
Co-opting traditions as metaphors for the struggles of everyday life has always been cinema’s staple, either because these traditions romanticize the world or because they inherently represent its ups and downs for those who uphold them. Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, raw with muted fury, venerated and castigated…
A French drama exploring a complicated, ultimately toxic marriage told from the perspective of a desperate wife and mother, Valérie Donzelli’s Just the Two of Us demonstrates both a knack for synchronicity and truly abysmal timing in premiering at last year’s Cannes Film Festival only two days after…
Vulcanizadora Joel Potrykus offered viewers a kind of hell on earth in 2014 when he released Buzzard, a crusty cumrag of a movie about the drudgery and paranoia of contemporary lower class life. It’s utterly brilliant, with a clear-eyed point of view that never looks down on its…
In contrast with the high-profile and ostentatious trappings of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which enmeshed the idiosyncrasies of genre with patent identity politics, Kit Zauhar’s survey of contemporary millennial society takes place within the microcosms of locale, character, and affect. Her first feature, the caustic but self-reflexive…
ESSAYS THE IMAGE AND THE AFTERGLOW: JANE SCHOENBRUN’S I SAW THE TV GLOW FEATURE BY: Frank Falisi THE JOY OF THEIR MAKING: THE FILMS OF ANTOINETTA ANGELIDI FEATURE BY: Andrew Reichel MAGNIFYING THE QUINCE TREE SUN FEATURE BY: Milo Garner INTERVIEWS ROMANCE IN TROUBLE TIMES: AN INTERVIEW WITH…
Patrick Dickinson’s Cottontail is an unusual type of ghost story. Its apparitions, such as they are, appear mostly in flashbacks, half-remembered tales, and, most prominently, in a letter delivered from beyond the grave. But this is no horror film, and the type of scares Dickinson traffics in are…
If the recurring discourse cycles of online spaces, namely on Twitter, are to be believed, we are in for some seriously prudish times. Every so often, a tweet will make the rounds, decrying displays of overt sexuality as unnecessary hindrances to otherwise well-running narratives. The technical descriptor, “well-running,”…
The specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) looms large over Chantal Akerman’s The Captive (2000). At times, it’s to such an extent that it feels like Akerman’s film is like Simon, the obsessive protagonist at the heart of The Captive, adamant on solving Ariane, the object of his…
There exists a sort of spectrum in female sports-centric films, with campy, comedic takes like Bring It On laying claim to one end while high-drama, anxiety-rich films like Black Swan occupy the antipodal space. One of these films showcases the competition and intensity that women endure to get…
All We Imagine as Light “This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening montage of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Clément Pinteaux’s jump-cut editing and Ranabir Das’ mobile camerawork…
The degree to which actors can elevate unexceptional material by their mere presence is difficult to gauge. After all, plenty of indifferently conceived star vehicles are duds. Viggo Mortensen’s second film as a director, The Dead Don’t Hurt is that rare example where a lead performance, here by…
Adapted from a 2001 article published in Texas Monthly and very loosely inspired by the life of law enforcement personnel Gary Johnson, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is ostensibly a whale of a tale about a mild-mannered audio technician who lived a double-life as a pretend assassin; first as…