For an era-defining band like 100 gecs — singer/producers Dylan Brady and Laura Les — it’s surprising that so few conversations about the group tend to involve talking about their actual music. gecs’ debut album, 1000 gecs — one of the final masterpieces of the 2010s — was…
Outside the confines of polite Parisian society, there lies a wild west on wheels, in a subculture known as the urban rodeo. Though participation is criminalized and heavily criticized, the exhilarating, and dangerous, motorbike subculture at the center of Rodeo acts as a catalyst for community. This is…
Just as rock music has fallen out of fashion, Yves Tumor has become increasingly insistent on performing it. What does it mean to become a rock star, dripping swagger and larger-than-life mystique, in an age where achieving actual mass popularity playing this kind of music is almost impossible?…
The latest film from French actor-director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is difficult to evaluate. One could argue that, for what it is, it is fairly accomplished. A showcase for mostly young talent, including some performers making their film debut, Forever Young is exuberantly melodramatic, the film’s form matching its protagonists’…
Three Nights a Week is less the love story between a straight man and a drag queen it has been billed as, and rather a love letter to a subculture and the invitations that it opens. Photographer Baptiste (Pablo Pauly) is ostensibly straight. He visits a World AIDS…
Naomi Kawase’s 2014 romance drama Still the Water is never short on striking imagery. Set in Amami Ôshima, an island off the southern coast of the Japanese mainland, the film is overflowing with beautiful shots of crashing waves, misty mountains, and painterly sunsets. A particularly memorable sequence early…
When Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was against the backdrop of a roiling and mostly insufferable online debate about “age gap,” coinciding with social media discovering P.T. Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. That film famously features a romantic, albeit nonsexual,…
From its first frames, Rikiya Imaizumi’s Call Me Chihiro is easily identifiable as a Netflix original. Adapted from Hiroyuki Yasuda’s manga Chihiro-san, the film’s flat, textureless cinematography and crisp digital sheen carry the signifiers associated with the kind of streaming dross that any discerning cinephile would avoid like…
Writer-director Christopher Landon has made a career out of taking some of the most tired and shopworn genre plots imaginable and infusing them with a welcome sense of self-awareness that, while not always resulting in great films, consistently delivers the goods entertainment-wise, from the Groundhog Day-inspired Happy Death…
A young woman from Tokyo finds herself in a strange town. In the beginning, she is looking for a tourist site, the ruins of an old castle perhaps, but all she finds are empty fields. Wandering around, she’s invited to play soccer with some kids, but soon they…
The first feature from Chinese filmmaker Wu Lang, Absence shares a title and cast with the director’s second short film, which played at Cannes in 2021. The distributor of this film’s synopsis for said short hints at the relationship between the two, suggesting that both are about two…
If one thing can be said for the award-winning, box office-safe, well-worn road of the biopic, it’s that with the volume of films being made, at least directors are starting to get innovative with the form. With Emily, actress Frances O’Connor (making her writing and directing debut) embraces…
In an era when any slob with a next-day delivery synth can create bleep-bloops in their bedroom and go viral overnight, the musical and technological landscape of the new millennium might as well be a different planet. But back in 2001, it was the pre-streaming, pre-YouTube era, and…
Despite boasting a filmography mostly known for its unorthodox approximations to period detail and the formal subversions that come with it, the defining characteristic of Albert Serra’s fiction oeuvre might be its subtler thematic undercurrents around the anxiety of insignificance. Since the bumbling buffoons of Don Quixote and…
Director Goran Stolevski has given his sophomore feature, Of an Age, a suitably malleable title that effectively expresses the various thematic and emotional preoccupations guiding the film. Most identifiably, it’s a coming-of-age story of a sort, or perhaps more accurately a coming-of-sexuality story. The film opens — and…
Bill Forsyth may have to bear the reductive, buzzy distinction of having “put Scottish cinema on the map,” but he at least did so with both a disarming degree of separation — shifting the sensation of discovery onto his characters — and an expectedly warm familiarity. Originally an…
For this writer, a personal cinematic pet peeve is when characters fire guns only for the bullets to seem to dissipate, never hitting anything. John Woo is, perhaps more than any other filmmaker from his generation, aware that bullets destroy shit. Every time a gun goes off, walls…
In the course of that rich history of films about con artists, the appeal has almost always been to watch largely amoral professionals execute their perfect plans in order to strip some rich jerk of their money. What Sharper presupposes is… maybe it isn’t? The result is a…
A Type A careerist finds her life spinning out of control after the man she’s long harbored feelings for announces his intentions of marrying a younger woman, inspiring her to recklessly insert herself into their relationship to try and split the happy couple apart. She feigns friendship with…
The post-independence era was a turbulent one for the small island nation of Jamaica. Having gained freedom from the British in 1962, the following decade of economic growth was also marked by increased inequality and escalating urban violence. It’s against this backdrop that writer-director Perry Henzell and co-writer…