Pawel Pawlikowski, the immaculate king of grim black-and-white Eastern European cinema, has made us wait eight years for a new film. After the exquisite moral excavation of postwar Polish society in Ida and in the now-modern classic Cold War (2018), Fatherland (aka 1949) turns toward the brutal fragmentation…
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, except for Leos Carax’s bizarro musical Annette (2021), the last decade of the Cannes Film Festival has boasted some of the worst opening films available to humanity. And to paraphrase a certain British novelist, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a…
It is not a steady wind that brings Nietzsche to the criticism of Magnificent Obsession, a film whose slavish self-sacrifice would doubtless atomize the long-dead German, but we must nonetheless contend with this collision. The following quotation will not immediately come to bear, but let it steep somewhat…
The world has changed a lot since The Collingswood Story pioneered Screenlife storytelling in 2002. Nickelback had the top single that year, mid-budget films still penetrated the top of the box office, and George Bush was president. Tate McRae wouldn’t be born for another year, and George R.R.…
It’s a marketer’s dream title, isn’t it: The Sheep Detectives. Straight to the point and brain-tickling. Indeed, considering the slick, straight-to-Amazon Prime aesthetic, it wouldn’t be surprising if the marketing team cooked up the title themselves. Which is to say, The Sheep Detectives is that sort of movie,…
The Burmese python — an invasive species eating into native animal populations in the Florida Everglades — might be at the heart of Xander Robin’s documentary The Python Hunt, but it’s man who has ultimately assumed the role of predator here. The state’s annual Python Challenge, unfolding over…
What better medium for communing with the spirits than film? Sights and sounds of eras since passed, or visions of things unknowable in reality — a memory machine and a dream machine in one. Fil Ieropoulos’ dense and experimental Uchronia, ostensibly both an imagined portrait of poet Arthur…
There was a time not so very long ago where, hard as it is to believe these days, East Asian cinema was commonplace among the hipper video stores and movie theatres of America. Hong Kong action films, Japanese horror pictures, Korean action and horror movies, and more were…
“It’s amazing to be able to create something that others don’t understand at all.” So says an elderly woman to the aspiring punk singer-songwriter of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz, one of the finest films from last year’s Japan Cuts festival. It could just as well be the theme…
“Living out of a suitcase” and splitting her time between New York and Madrid, Isabel Sandoval arrived in Manila in early February. She returned to the country to visit her mom in her hometown in Cebu, to shoot a new project with details being kept strictly under wraps,…
In 2020, HBO began airing one of the funniest and most significant docuseries in the history of the form, How To With John Wilson, in which a man named John Wilson attempted to give advice or illuminate a certain banal ubiquity of urban life with the help of…
Although cinema is at its best when it gleefully breaks the rules, some operating procedures need to be in place when you embark upon an airplane-crash disaster movie — or a schlocky shark slasher for that matter. When up in the air and suddenly urged to fasten your…
The current acclaim for Canadian cinema is, like many attempts to promote a new wave, a snapshot of a rising generation that aside from nationality has very little in common. Matt Johnson, Pascal Plante, Sophy Romvari, Kazik Radwanski, and Antoine Bourges are all familiar with Canadian film funding…
Early on in Francesco Sossai’s wistful, funny The Last One For The Road, a German tourist at a bar declares that he’s here to see Italy before it’s destroyed. “I think you’re too late,” shoots back 50-something Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano). There’s a despondent kernel of truth to the…
Plenty of films have traversed the anxieties of separation and national identity, specifically the question of what happens when a nation breaks up from within, is no longer its own, and finds its citizens beholden to another way of life. In Francesco Sossai’s sophomore feature, division and anarchy…
The trouble with effective satire is that sometimes the original mark already exists in such a heightened state that any attempts to ridicule, undermine, or otherwise deconstruct it ultimately fall flat. Unless you happen to be riddled with gross ignorance, anyone reading this review must surely have some…
It’s never easy admitting that you’re getting old. As we round the corner into the mid-2020s, an entire generation has to reckon with the idea that their formative years were 20, even 30 years ago. Stagnation, be it perpetual ‘80s nostalgia or a pandemic bringing time to a…