Hero is one of the great films by one of the world’s most brilliant image-makers in Zhang Yimou, shot by one of the world’s most attuned and adaptive cinematographers in Christopher Doyle, and stars more than a smattering of the most (justly) recognizable faces in Chinese cinema with…
At a moment of especially heightened anxiety occurring — when else? — during Shabbat dinner, one of Between the Temples’ wiser characters offers a parable about toothpaste, its tube, and the impossibility of getting the fated gel back inside once it’s been squeezed out. “Words can’t be taken…
The dying days of French colonial rule are given ironically youthful life in Robin Campillo’s Red Island. Set in the early 1970s in Madagascar, the film envisions the end of an empire from the innocent, fragmented perspective of young Thomas, who lives on base with his family and…
This critic has often compared Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon’s films to the work of Jacques Tati, but in their latest film, The Falling Star, what strikes the viewer is how much it feels like something out of the Aki Kaurismäki universe. Abel and Gordon, a real-life married…
Nathan Silver is perhaps best known for his prodigious output, releasing nine feature films period of 2012 to 2019. His prolificness is made all the more impressive by the conditions under which his films have typically been made: microbudgets; international productions; structural scriptments with dialogue written the day…
“Our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve and how they see us the rest of our lives.” The new documentary Daughters opens with these introductory words, spoken by Angela Patton, the film’s co-director (alongside Natalie…
First things first: it will be important to remember, going forward, that John Woo’s 2024 movie The Killer, despite being a remake of his 1989 film The Killer, is, beyond some details of narrative, not remotely the same movie. It’s also not remotely as good, but that would…
At it’s best, Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us manages to evoke Stephen King’s It. Based on Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, the film begins in the small fictional town of Plethora, Maine. A drone shot introduces us to the landscape of King’s home state, where…
Marx’s vampires and specters; the oil crisis, Vietnam War, and industrializing slaughterhouses as the background for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the commodification of the spectacularly traumatic at Jupiter’s Claim and beyond in Nope — horror and capitalism have long been and remain in frequent conversation, to say the least.…
With 2024 marking the arrival of their eighth co-directed feature (with a couple additional co-director credits going to daughter Zelda in recent efforts), the projects of husband-wife duo John Adams and Toby Poser (known collectively as The Adams Family) have been improving in quality and increasing in visibility…
Drowning Dry Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed promise, but became a bit exhausting since it seemed that the director had one single idea — rage as a substitute…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of proving that bolsters the act of believing and allots evil its due place in the order of things. For atheists, or those in-between, the…
Despite being active for roughly five decades, with a handful of theatrical and television works within his filmography — including his 1980 debut To Love the Damned and 2003’s six-hour magnum opus The Best of Youth — the 73-year-old Milanese filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana still holds a quite…
Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age sensibilities of Levan Akin’s And Then we Danced and his more recent Crossing are a far cry from Lea Kulumbegashbili’s harrowing Beginning, for example.…
The Sparrow in the Chimney Those who have seen the Zürcher twins’ other works, The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider, may have felt a tension building across the two titles. In both of those works, cramped living spaces lead to shoulder-bumping and repeated confrontations…
Will Neil Marshall ever get his mojo back? After finding early success with a run of lean, mean, low-budget face-melters — Dog Soldiers and The Descent are still near perfect genre films — Marshall has floundered in both larger-budgeted efforts (a woe begotten Hellboy reboot) and cheap, uninspired DTV efforts (The Reckoning,…
In 2017, the avant-groove trio of John Medeski (keyboards), Billy Martin (percussions), and Chris Wood (bass) arrive at an old mountain-top mansion in the Catskills to record their first new album in seven years. With only their musical instruments in hand, and after their initial plan to record…
Ababooned There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of André Forcier, the writer-director of the new comedy Ababooned. But he is actually one of the grand old men of Québécois cinema, and this latest film is his sixteenth feature in a career that began in the early 1970s.…
The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows his place, recognizes his privileges, and respects — to quote his deity and muse, Kamala Harris — “the context of all in which [he…
There must be some sort of an unwritten connection between the warmth of summer and the heat of one’s newfound emotions, the ripeness in the air and the maturation of sensations. It’s a special seasonal shift, especially for the youth who so often realize their sensual and corporeal…