Israeli filmmaker Hadas Ben Aroya’s second feature film, All Eyes Off Me, offers a naturalistic glimpse into Israel’s contemporary youth culture as it shifts its focus from one main character to the next. Split into three episodes, the film follows Danny (Hadar Katz), a young woman drifting through…
Country music has a dark history of songs about killing your lover. Men want to kill their wives for cheating. Women want to kill their husbands for cheating. Usually, the other man or woman winds up dead too. Which is to say, artists have had a lot of…
When it comes to metaphorical expressions, perhaps no other narrative and visual motif can provide a sense of boundless liberation and spiritual freedom as much as the vast, open oceans do. And as the title of Tyler Atkins’ feature debut quite obviously suggests, Ocean Boy is a film…
Keba Robinson has been releasing music under the Crosslegged moniker since 2011, when she released the album Bad Body Language. In the Bandcamp liner notes, she describes the album — which sells for a steep $50 — as “[her] roots, made many moons ago.” It’s a no-frills, unglamorous…
Spanish-language filmmaker Ruth Caudeli has developed a surprisingly consistent and quantifiable body of work in the past few years. Her films are relatively plotless, centering queer women in transitional periods of their relationships or outlooks on life, and they tend to draw from her life experiences as an…
The death of the mid-budget studio rom-com is a topic that has been commented on and analyzed ad nauseum by countless entertainment websites and social media users, all of whom decry the fate of one of the more financially lucrative film genres. The advent of streaming and evolving…
“I come from the tail end of that generation in advertising when there was usually an unfinished novelin the lower desk drawer. It was still the glory days of the baby boomers. While we might have sought to fit into society in economically useful or at least minimally remunerative ways, we still refused, at…
While it never quite led to the promise of a more democratic cinematic landscape, there’s now an entire history of digital movie-making that exists both within and apart from the otherwise long-dominant strain of mainstream, narrative Hollywood cinema. Everything from Bill Gunn’s Personal Problems to Michael Snow’s *Corpus…
Li Xiaofeng’s Back to the Wharf begins with a tragic accident that escalates, shockingly, to murder. After high school student Song Hao (Zhou Zhengjie) stumbles into the wrong house while searching for a friend, he comes across a drunk older man who believes he’s a robber. The man…
Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful Beings is a brutal yet abundantly tender coming-of-age tale that examines how intergenerational trauma mars the friendships that teenagers have with each other. As a film that focuses on the dysfunctional bonds between four boys — most of whom come from abusive…
Premiering at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and dropping into U.S. theaters in the autumn, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO was a film that challenged both our notions of the “animal movie” at large and how we assemble and contort images into tidy, digestible narratives, no matter…
When Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses was released in 2003 (following numerous distribution delays by its original producer Universal Studios due to objectionable content), many chalked it up to the vanity project of a rockstar. Zombie, after all, had made his name first with the band White…
“READ ME”: a visage lit in orange glow, hands, bodies, hands caressing bodies, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, the two words blinking mutely from a desktop screen, silence. So opens — in oneiric, inert fashion — Morvern Callar, a palimpsest of orange, beige, and grayscale, set to the disquieting…
What makes a great writer? Romantics and bookworms might wax poetic about unparalleled emotional insight or the fearless plumbing of the human condition, but pragmatists (and publishers) know the real answer: the secret to a great writer is a great editor. Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary Turn Every Page: The…
Simply put: Julia Wu has established herself as one of the most consistent artists of the decade so far. The Australian-Chinese singer-songwriter has put out an album every year since 2019 (and more before that) — the mixed Mandarin and English 5 am in 2019, its entirely English…
The ’60s and ’70s were a highly politically-charged time for Italian cinema. The country’s neorealism movement chronicled working class lives in a post-WWII Italy — a newly post-fascist society still reeling from the fallout of the deadliest, most devastating conflict in human history. But unlike these grounded proletarian dramas, films like Ettore…
Rarely does the weight of a classic so gracefully crimp under the weightlessness of an earnest successor, less keen on displacing the gravitas of the original than it is to enchant the world with renewed splendor. In Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, thought by many to be the director’s crowning…
If the recent High Heat represents a kind of floor for a DTV genre work — some perfect okay action courtesy of a game cast with a weak screenplay but professional production values — Black Warrant resides somewhere in the basement. Wholly generic, the film is a paint-by-numbers…
Tucked into the lap of the tributaries of the Euphrates River, the city of Babylon once towered. Hammurabi, who conquered the entirety of Southern Mesopotamia, made Babylon his capital as the extent of his conquest had now made the fertile city the center of the new Babylonian Empire.…
In her overview of lesbian-feminist criticism, Bonnie Zimmerman urged lesbian critics to look into “what has been unspoken and barely imagined” in order to envision what has never been. What makes establishing a lesbian historiography doubly difficult, however, is that the truth is not so much unspoken but…
Of the so-called “three amigos” — comprising Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu — whose films have in recent years penetrated the international stage both critically and commercially, Iñárritu arguably has also generated the greatest controversy. This should come as no surprise: where Cuarón and…