It’s undeniably passé — and often critically fruitless — to note the difficult “art of adaptation” when it comes to translating literature for the screen, but films like Downtown Owl throw the challenge into such sharp relief that it’s impossible to skate past it unobserved. Based on the…
With our own culture marginalized, when it isn’t being stripped for its most clean and convenient parts, queer people have often taken back from the mainstream, twisting our culture into something new, or, perhaps more subversively, revealing the latent queerness that was always there. Superhero movies, Hollywood’s primary…
Imtiaz Ali, classified as an auteur for skewering the conventional (in)sensibility of Bollywood’s melodramatic romances, is actually somewhat unclassifiable. He began his career in the Indian indie space, making films like Socha Na Tha (2005), Jab We Met (2007), and (to a lesser extent) Love Aaj Kal (2009) that tinkered with the typical…
A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with Karl Marx’s famed specter of communism, have come together not to exorcise but embrace this specter in a warm hug and to give it…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion magazine editor in his 30s, who, in spite of his good looks, a life cushioned by material comforts, and a close-knit circle of gay…
There are two films that writer-director Zarrar Kahn struggles to reconcile in his feature-length debut In Flames. The first, a domestic drama about women struggling against an entrenched patriarchal system in modern-day Karachi, is a resounding success, fueled by a remarkable performance courtesy of actress Ramesha Nawal; the…
Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim as one of the queerest films of the 2020s so far. That his first two films, You Won’t Be Alone and Of An Age,…
Of Living Without Illusion A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film, from the past — emerge in the stretch of the present space, less a sensation of tension than an accumulation.…
A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film, from the past — emerge in the stretch of the present space, less a sensation of tension than an accumulation. Connection becomes as likely…
The inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies closed this past Sunday with the world premiere of Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar’s outrageous mockumentary Rap World. The buzzy event was attended by numerous local film fixtures and luminaries, and was held at Vidiots, the beloved, newly…
Ned Benson’s The Greatest Hits opens with its heroine, Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a young librarian, standing alone in her beautifully half-lit, tranquil apartment before a mapped-out board littered with various notes, date cards, and pictures of her and her boyfriend, Max (David Corenswet). As she closes her eyes,…
You Burn Me Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France; The Tempest in Sycorax. Of course, these are not straightforward adaptations, and Piñeiro uses…
At first blush (and the next few, for that matter), actress Brittany Snow’s directorial debut, Parachute, which premiered in the Narrative Feature Competition at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival, seems lab-created for a certain other, Park City-set fest. It’s a drama cut through with some messy romance and…
With 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, director Adam Wingard became one of the few Western filmmakers to realize that the kaiju movie is more a graphic exercise than a narrative one. Over the many years and films and iterations of all of these characters, they’ve been avatars for all…
Slackers have been the bread and butter of indie cinema since 90’s mainstays like Clerks and Slacker helped jumpstart the whole modern American independent film scene in the first place. For young artists and bohemians drawn to filmmaking, that stultifying sense of dissatisfaction and aimlessness key to the…
Russell Crowe plays ex-cop Roy Freeman in the mystery thriller Sleeping Dogs, a film that feels like it was made dispassionately by a committee of business school graduates trying to squeeze every last nickel out of beleaguered fans of such receding specters as Memento and Se7en. The film…
How old were you when you recognized that the villain of Ivan Reitman’s original Ghostbusters was the Environmental Protection Agency? Obviously, it’s the text of the film — no parsing of hidden meaning required — with the government agency personified by sniveling bureaucrat Walter Peck (played by perennial…
Part of a generation of First Nations filmmakers that also includes Rachel Perkins (Radiance, Bran Nue Dae), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country, The New Boy) and Wayne Blaire (The Sapphires, Top End Wedding), Gamilaroi filmmaker Ivan Sen has, for over two decades, been an important figure…
To the uninitiated, written descriptions of Radu Jude’s cinema might give the wrong impression of his films as dizzyingly dialectical exercises requiring a complete working knowledge of the last century of Romanian politics, 20th-century philosophers and artists, and, perhaps, a good deal of patience. While it’s true that…
A curious counterpoint to Celine Song’s much-lauded Past Lives may be found in Mimang, Kim Tae-yang’s feature debut, and the relative prestige of the former — also a first full-length effort from its filmmaker — speaks, perhaps, to the way introspection has been mediated and even altered through…
Irish Wish marks the second collaboration between Janeen Damian and Lindsay Lohan, after their lukewarm yet distinctly feel-good Falling for Christmas. Far from the wintry Yuletide atmosphere of that film, the director-star combo here moves to the emerald summertime of Ireland. Irish Wish follows Maddie Kelly (portrayed by…