Cinephilia is a dangerous game. Follow the director’s rules closely, and you are, more often than not, rewarded with insider access. These are reference points that the filmmaker usually calls attention to by placing them on the same (fore)ground as the film’s narrative; it’s their way of honoring…
There’s a difference between a breakfast of scrambled eggs (with sausage, tomatoes, and mixed peppers) and a proper omelet. The combination of the same ingredients — perhaps with a few extra spices thrown in the mix — makes all the difference between a sufficient (even good!) multi-dish breakfast…
Arriving less than a month after the release of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s queer crime-comedy Drive-Away Dolls, Love Lies Bleeding, from British filmmaker Rose Glass, signals a mini-trend of high-profile, lesbian-noirs hitting theaters in early 2024. A late ’80’s-set bit of nastiness awash in sex, a pervasive air of…
In his lifetime, Johann Sebastian Bach was not considered one of the great composers. He was known for his virtuosic ability, but his vast oeuvre remained largely unheard and unsought. After his death, his music dwindled into obscurity: certain keyboard pieces remained in general circulation, though generally for…
The Book of Solutions Michel Gondry feels like an artist from another time, even if that time wasn’t very long ago. The only movie he directed with any real staying power, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has long been claimed by the Charlie Kaufman oeuvre, and it’s…
The staff of In Review Online have come to the collective decision to abide by the international call from Strike Germany. We will be withholding coverage of the Berlin International Film Festival on the grounds that its institutional backing from the German government is marred by the latter’s…
We return to the year 10,191 for Dune: Part Two, the cleverly named second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal, beloved work of sci-fi literature. When last we saw Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), he’d survived an otherwise completely successful ambush attack on his family’s rule…
In the AI-drenched bizarro world that is 2024, the premise of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released 20 years ago this spring, seems almost ludicrously simple. We’re so used to being fed marketing doublespeak about improving and optimizing our future selves that the flip side…
Danis Tanović might be the most personal, visually compelling, and thematically thoughtful political auteur working in European cinema. And regrettably, his name will largely go unrecognized by even the most globetrotting and well-watched of cinephiles. With very few exceptions, Western film lovers have failed to properly appreciate Tanović’s…
When it was released back in late 2021, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, the director’s first feature film since the dissolution of the long, fruitful filmmaking partnership with his younger brother, was popularly met with some variation of the sentiment “Guess Ethan is the funny one.” With…
God knows it’s hard to get noticed in the indie film scene these days, which is why Jon Bass’ new experiment in self-releasing warrants some attention. Bass, a “Hey, I recognize that guy” character actor who has appeared on TV, movies, and Broadway, has begun releasing his new…
Written and directed by Erblin Nushi, I Love You More is a delicate film which explores the heartbreak of queer adolescence. The film centers on a young Kosovar teenager, Ben (Don Shala), who is trying to keep his relationship with his online boyfriend, Leo (Leonik Sahiti), a secret…
Stan Brakhage’s 1958 film Anticipation of the Night could perhaps be likened to the late-19th and early-20th century tonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg. In works such as Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Pelleas und Melisande (1903), the composer had not yet broken with the tradition of Western tonality, and…
That hunk in the romance novel you’re reading — what if he was real and ready to mingle? That’s the entertaining and confident premise of Ashes, the newest film from experienced Turkish director Erdem Tepegöz. A pretty, married woman reads a smutty book and scopes out the patisserie…
The familiar quietude of vacant alleys, secret crooks, and empty restaurants; those shared moments of unspoken reminiscence and silenced discovery. With Here, Bas Devos trains his patient gaze on the ambiguity of attraction, whether for another person or for the microscopic environments flourishing under the scrutiny of moss.…
Steppenwolf Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has directed 15 films in the last 12 years, a breakneck pace to rival even Hong Sang-soo. Not many seem to have received any kind of US distribution; his most recent work to be properly released was 2020’s Yellow Cat, a charming if…
Gábor Reisz’s latest film is Hungarian through and through, but despite that, it feels very much like a sanded-down Romanian one. In fact, some of the underlying themes in Explanation for Everything have been addressed with much more subtlety in Cristian Mungiu’s recent films, such as R.M.N. and…
Dear Kaita Ablaze France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary energy into his Les Chants du Maldoror, a prose poem featuring a man so evil and ugly that he denies…
The interaction between documenting the act of filmmaking and the final film as a meaning-making document for the filmmaker, subject, and spectator is a staple of postmodern Iranian cinema. Abbas Kiarostami experimented with it first in Close-Up (1990) and then in Through the Olive Trees (1994); Jafar Panahi,…
France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary energy into his Les Chants du Maldoror, a prose poem featuring a man so evil and ugly that he denies killing himself such…