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…
Anora Following Red Rocket in 2021, Anora marks Sean Baker’s second straight feature in competition at Cannes, and this one comes with reports of packed screenings with overflow press watching seated on aisle stairs — anything to catch a glimpse of the buzzy title. Its programming slot in…
Long heralded as the harbinger of snore-inducing boredom, slow cinema, in actuality, is a somewhat paradoxical replica of what film scholar Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions.” Gunning coined this term to celebrate the non-narrative pleasures of cinema pre-1906 that audiences from all parts of the world…
Once upon a time, there were frightened people. They were so frightened that their imagination escaped,” says a soothing, soft, and elderly feminine voice. The words belong to Jalala, the storyteller (or should we say seller?) of the barren and hostile enclave in which Hala Elkoussy sets her…
It wasn’t all that long ago when it seemed John Green’s shine couldn’t be blocked. A Young Adult author coming of prominence during the great age of Young Adult literature, Green skyrocketed to pop(/nerd) culture stardom on the ubiquity of both his books and their film adaptations. The…
For expectant moms seeking the sort of potty humor that What To Expect When You’re Expecting, simply can’t deliver, Pamela Adlon’s debut feature film Babes might be just what the OB-GYN ordered. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau star as Eden and Dawn, two lifelong besties who find themselves…
Fan fiction has long been an outlet for superfans to reimagine worlds and celebrities, weaving narratives out of their wildest fantasies. Whether you call it creative writing, an exercise in delusion, or a mixture of both, the genre has certainly hit the mainstream, with self-published novels becoming #BookTok…
Audiences are excited about the art of the stunt again. You’ve got Tom Cruise skydiving and crashing trains, Christopher Nolan’s Protagonist bungee-jumping over skyscrapers, Keanu Reeves vs. a hundred goons. Articles are being written about practical stunts vs. CGI. The consensus is building that there should be an…
The capacity to imagine a better future is integral to any successful progressive movement. Amidst historic protests around the United States against both the relentless siege by Israel on Gaza and major universities’ financial ties to machines of war enabling the siege, students hold their ground in the…
Slow, Marija Kavtaradzė’s second feature film, finds solace in the physicality that builds a world around its audience. The opening moments find a man mounting Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė) as the two bridge the distance between their bodies in tandem, their breaths in rhythm. The man on top of…