If the arc of the moral universe indeed bends toward justice, then there just might have been a sliver of proof in the sold-out screening of Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last month. The infinitely quotable Neil Simon script filtered through May’s…
In a crowded field of sci-fi adaptations, the buzzy TV treatments of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven stand out. In Kindred, as adapted by showrunner and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a young woman named Dana (Mallori Johnson) and her boyfriend Kevin (Micah Stock), a…
It takes a kind of charming naïveté these days to purport to represent the vagaries of sexuality onscreen without so much as a sideways glance at realist cinematic conventions. Where touchy controversies abound and careful hedging around them has become the norm, one’s best defense for wading into…
Emancipation attempts, and mightily fails, to balance a film stodgy enough to play in a high school classroom with Hollywood’s typically rousing approach to historical epic filmmaking. What immediately stands out in Emancipation is the color, or, to be more precise, the lack of it. Opening with the camera…
Something from Tiffany’s isn’t much more substantive than your average holiday rom-com, but it’s leads are so likeable and its approach so breezy that it will go out as one of the year’s better Christmas efforts. Someday, Hollywood is going to figure out what to do with Zoey…
Has there been a director so wildly prolific as Johnnie To in our modern era? Hong Sang-soo comes to mind, albeit occupying a radically different mode of film production than To. Regardless, the last 20-odd years have given us a remarkably fruitful period of consistently good-to-great films, as…
French auteur Jacques Rivette’s relationship to novelist Honoré de Balzac lasted throughout his entire life. His fascination first made its way into his directorial work with Out 1, his 13-hour experimental film often regarded as his magnum opus. Featuring an incredible range of characters and plot lines that…
Your Christmas or Mine? is a totally misguided holiday film with no emotional stakes or rooting interests to be found. Yuletide romance Your Christmas or Mine? opens with its twenty-something lovers, James (Asa Butterfield) and Hayley (Cora Kirk), saying tearful goodbyes at the train station as each heads to…
A Wounded Fawn is a delightfully weird and lo-fi work of playful horror. There’s not much left to do with serial killer narratives these days, but that hasn’t stopped writer-director Travis Stevens from trying anyway. With A Wounded Fawn, his follow-up to last year’s fairly well-received Jakob’s Wife, Stevens…
In recent years, Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet was the site of most of the major Danish royalty’s births. Last year, it was ranked the 15th best hospital in the world. It has, at least in name, been around since 1757, and, if you were to stand on the very top…
In his introduction to Olivier Assayas’ autobiographical essay/memoir A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord, Adrian Martin writes that “Assayas has always identified himself with three particular tutelary figures who all proclaimed themselves, in effect, ‘against the cinema’: Debord, Andy Warhol, and Robert Bresson.” He continues: “How might…
S:INEMA is a lushly produced and confidently fluid record that goes a long way in asserting SAAY’s unique artistic character. Although the average K-pop fan might not know SAAY by name, they may be familiar with some of her work. After debuting in the short-lived K-pop group EvoL…
Bones and All isn’t successful across the board, but it thankfully prioritizes Guadagnino’s strengths and results in arguably his finest film. Nearly six years out from its Sundance premiere, Call Me by Your Name has seen its cultural reputation dimmed considerably amidst revelations of star Armie Hammer’s unsavory predilections,…
Septet: The Story of Hong Kong The subtitle for Septet: The Story of Hong Kong isn’t an all that accurate reflection of the omnibus’s breadth: These seven short films do span a robust 70 years, from the 1950s (Sammo Hung’s Exercise) to the 2020s (Tsui Hark’s Conversation in…
The subtitle for Septet: The Story of Hong Kong isn’t an all that accurate reflection of the omnibus’s breadth: These seven short films do span a robust 70 years, from the 1950s (Sammo Hung’s Exercise) to the 2020s (Tsui Hark’s Conversation in Depth), but since nearly all of…
Actual People captures actual truths about the ways that young people behave. Kit Zauhar follows up her promising short film, Helicopter, with an equally talky debut feature. Actual People is an episodic chronicle of a failed graduation, as Riley (Zauhar) finds her life — or her hopes for it…
Nothing Lasts Forever is a zippy but patient task-taking doc on the ills, myths, and hypocrisies of the global diamond industry. In 1929, the Surrealist painter René Magritte cheekily told viewers that a pipe is not a pipe, inviting audiences to interrogate the difference between an object and the…
Midnights is stuck somewhere between Taylor Swift’s classic pop textures and recent dreamy minimalism, to disappointing ends. As an unabashedly pop record, Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights invokes the bold aesthetic statements that she sought to make on 1989, Reputation, and Lover. Her most recent original albums before…
Causeway is a sturdy enough film with fine anchoring performances, but it doesn’t otherwise boast much in the way of substance. It’s been some time since we’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence step into a dramatic role quite like the one offered in Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway. Lawrence, who spent many years…
My Policeman is a beige, two-hour yawn that fails to live up to superior works occupying the same thematic space. Harry Styles kept finding himself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons this fall. First, there was the troubled production history of Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, whose…
Something in the Dirt is a formidable DIY effort bearing Benson & Moorhead’s expected formal ingenuity, but it’s unfortunately all in service of a rather trite subject. DIY genre auteurs Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are back, delivering another trippy two-hander. Across the past decade, these two have built…