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…
Body doubles and deception have always been the fertile staples of romantic comedy — look no further than Shakespeare, who imbued such courtly antics with lively flourish to inspire the critical reflexivity and popular recognition that has come to define the Western (and thus modern) literary scene. The…
Sadly, new romantic comedy About My Father is not a companion piece to Pedro Almodóvar’s magnificent All About My Mother, but instead an attempted star vehicle for rising stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco, who makes a lot of jokes about being Italian that so inspire fits of wheezing laughter…
A delicate and bittersweet queer coming-of-age film, A Song Sung Blue is also, unfortunately, weighed down by all the predictable beats that befall its bildungsroman genre. Set in the early 2010s in Harbin, China, Geng Zihan’s debut feature follows fifteen-year-old Liu Xian (Zhou Meijun), who’s sent off to…
In This Issue: FEATURES: CANNES FILM FESTIVAL: Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda) by Lawrence Garcia // Only The River Flows (Wei Shujun) by Micahel Sicinski // Marguerite’s Theorem (Anna Novion) by Andrew Dignan // The Pot-au-Feu (Trần Anh Hùng) by Emilio Diaz // A Prince (Pierre Creton) by Michael Sicinski // Vincent Must Die (Karim Leklou) by…
In 1972, struggling to follow up his generation-defining and career-redefining What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye had writer’s block. The ambitious concept album detailing the social strifes of the Vietnam era was hailed as groundbreaking and had become Motown’s biggest record to date. Following its success, Gaye renegotiated his…
Trần Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu charts a romance between gourmet chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoit Magimel) and his cook, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), in late 18th-century France. Their relationship as creative collaborators and lovers sidesteps the typical pitfalls of complicated entanglement or fraught power dynamics, Hùng instead taking a more…
Radu Jude’s new short, The Potemkinists, finds the director in typically didactic form, which is one of his greatest virtues — why not say what you mean, especially when it comes to politics? At the present moment, film holds perhaps the least cultural impact it has ever had,…
Typically, calling a film a faithful adaptation of its source material can constitute praise. It’s a signal of approval, a fan’s casual imprimatur. It’s a definitive blessing that this new entry has retained enough of the source’s initial look, feel, and spirit so as to be worthy of…
“The place? New York City. The time? Now: 1962. And there’s no time or place like it.” Down With Love, Peyton Reed’s 2003 technicolor pastiche of the 1960s battle-of-the-sexes rom-com, begins with the above winking acknowledgement, which makes clear two things: its own artificiality and a recognition that,…
A high-angle shot of a yakuza and his girlfriend continues following the woman overhead as she crosses a street to a school swimming pool. The camera then passes over the pool’s fence and lands on portly bully Deguchi, who calls out from atop a diving board, “I have…
Love Again sounds like a title where novelty goes to die, and the resulting film certainly does nothing to deviate from such lowered expectations, even with the appearance of beloved French-Canadian songstress Céline Dion, making her feature film debut. It’s rather ironic that star Priyanka Chopra Jonas finally…
Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? comes courtesy of Studio Canal and Working Title, two production companies who have created a cottage industry of star-laden British features that tend to err on the side of twee in their depiction of love in the modern age,…
Perennially undervalued, Joseph H. Lewis receives a single paragraph in Andrew Sarris’ canonical The American Cinema (relegated to the expressive esoterica category alongside Andre de Toth, Allan Dwan, Jacques Tourneur, etc.). Sarris at least has the good sense to give a special mention to Gun Crazy, which he…
It’s easy to see into the future. All one has to do is see the present and ask what would happen if we accepted the weirdest part of it. It’s always funny to inevitably get the details wrong — the 1970s color palettes of Logan’s Run (1976) or…
Part of what’s so great about the Prismatic Ground festival is that it makes space for genuine cinematic curios, works that are so sufficiently distinct from usual modes of creation that they might otherwise slip through the cracks. That is definitely the case with Where Is This Street?,…
Alexandre Larose’s work is no stranger to the descriptors underlined by Impressionism, typically reflecting its aesthetic sensibilities of refracted, textured light. In fact, he seems to lean into these sensibilities in the synopses for the three films that comprise his scènes de ménage, discerning them — each a…