The career of Romanian director Paul Negoescu has not been easy to pin down. His debut feature, A Month in Thailand (2012), was a remarkable, neo-Rohmerian character study — an expertly documented journey through Bucharest’s club scene on New Year’s Eve, which slips in its fictional shaping almost…
No doubt this has been said elsewhere already, but the most effective horror traffics in an unreality that’s very much tethered to our real world. Suburban haunted houses of poltergeists and conjurings, complete with a jumpscare-per-minute metric, would surely find an audience, as would a Gothic romance in…
The past decade suggests an encroaching — or, perhaps at this point, arrived — renaissance in Indigenous art. Regardless of the medium, native voices are becoming not only pervasive, but essential to the spectrum of modern American art. Authors like Tommy Orange, Brandon Hobson, and Stephen Graham Jones…
Nomad (Director’s Cut) One of the finest films of the Hong Kong New Wave, Patrick Tam’s Nomad (1982), plays at this year’s NYAFF in a new restoration, advertised as a “Director’s Cut.” As near as I can figure, the only real difference between this version and the one…
One of the finest films of the Hong Kong New Wave, Patrick Tam’s Nomad (1982), plays at this year’s NYAFF in a new restoration, advertised as a “Director’s Cut.” As near as I can figure, the only real difference between this version and the one that was initially…
The history of the Western is fertile territory for studying many of the greatest American filmmakers of the 20th century. While none worked exclusively in the genre — Ford, Hawks, Mann, Boetticher, Lewis, de Toth, and a litany of others dabbled in all manner of modes — each…
Young filmmakers making gangster-adjacent genre films is a time-honored tradition — it’s a mode of moviemaking with a built-in propensity for ready-made conflict, violence, stylized nighttime photography, and maybe even some doomed romanticism. Na Jiazuo’s debut feature Streetwise fits snuggly into this well-worn niche, a Jia Zhangke-inflected bit…
Long serving as a fun bit of Internet trivia to stoke the engagement machine, fervently celebrated actor/writer/director Greta Gerwig’s canceled 2014 CBS pilot — a gender-flipped reboot of How I Met Your Mother naturally dubbed How I Met Your Dad — takes on a retroactive significance as she…
In the midst of the World War Two, Australian journalist Paul Brickhill was bored by reality; to him, war fever was a case of major hysteria, and despite his advancement from stuttering cadet journalist to sub-editor at a regional imprint, the monotonous prospects of his job breathed enough…
“Girlfriend” — whether the companionship implied is defined via romantic means, as a partnership, or via an external projection of friendship, the term is more often mistaken for whichever suggests a bond closer to heterosexual “normalcy.” Between girlfriends, the line between the two meanings can grow thin, stretching…
Audiences hankering for a new James Bond film can tide themselves over with Landon Van Soest’s The Jewel Thief, an engaging true crime documentary and character study of the criminal prodigy Gerald Daniel Blanchard. During his long career, which began as a teenage fraudster in small town Nebraska,…
Argentinian filmmaker Gustavo Fontán has produced fourteen feature films since 2003, but still hasn’t broken through on the film festival circuit in a substantial way. This is perhaps odd, given the attention that Argentina has received from the film world in the last two decades. But judging from…
Released in 2006 to mixed reviews and respectable, if unremarkable, box office, Déjà Vu was the third collaboration (of an eventual five) between director Tony Scott and superstar Denzel Washington. A slick, propulsive thriller, Déjà Vu has gradually amassed a reputation as one of Scott’s very best works.…
It goes without saying that the city of Paris, more than any other megalopolis, has — as a constant of film history — provided an unending range of both visual and narrative fodder, and also embodied a certain characteristic that can not only present itself as a milieu,…
Historically held in low-regard, the coming-of-age comedy (or, to be less discrete, the teen sex comedy) has long served as a useful snapshot of the culture’s evolving anxieties and shifting mores. From the anti-authority thumb in the eye of National Lampoon’s Animal House to the post-(Bill)Clinton public dissemination…
Jon Hamm and Tina Fey, two of the most beloved television actors of the 21st century, have been orbiting each other for so long that it’s a little surprising they haven’t shared more screen time together. Hamm famously appeared in a multi-episode arc of 30 Rock as a…
Long the standard bearer in American animation, specializing in four-quadrant hits that thread the needle between entertaining small children and reducing their parents to tears, Pixar Animation Studios has had a rough last few years. With the output already diluted by shareholder-demanded but creatively unnecessary sequels, prequels, and…
Anna Roller’s directorial debut, Dead Girls Dancing, boasts a quite familiar plot, following three German high schoolers who embark on a road trip throughout Italy after their graduation. It’s an impulsive decision that, right off the bat, establishes a “girls just wanna have fun” narrative around the trio…
Part coming-of-age tale, part ghost story, Charlotte Le Bon’s Falcon Lake stands out among its “teenager finds himself over the course of an idyllic summer in the country” counterparts by consistently subverting the tropes of the subgenre. Set in the French countryside, the film follows 13-year-old Bastien (Joseph…
In a movie landscape dense with stodgy prequels, unremarkable sequels, and remakes that nobody asked for, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that rare thing: a palpably joyous second installment in a franchise that, far from overstaying its welcome, is only just warming up. It’s not so much a…
A deceptive airiness courses through No Love Lost, the sophomore feature from Erwan Le Duc — which follows his equally quaint and whimsical The Bare Necessity (2019). That earlier film, which was stylistically memorable for its eccentric cast and bucolic images, chronicled the unlikely romance between the police…