The Marvel Cinematic Universe has done a great job of earning a reputation for grinding down the personalities of interesting directors-for-hire with endless tinkering and boring pre-vizzed visual effects sequences. Filmmakers like Edgar Wright, Ryan Coogler, and Sam Raimi have all struggled, to varying degrees of success or…
Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Eight Mountains opens with a young man’s voiceover accompanying a series of natural Italian landscapes. The voice belongs to Pietro, the only son of Torinese middle-class parents — his father a factory engineer, his mother a teacher…
Concerning the brief, fleeting romance between a woman who writes audio descriptions for films and her harshest critic, an all but totally blind man, Naomi Kawase’s thinly-sketched Radiance feels designed to court claims of poignancy. The pair clash repeatedly as she tries to lend assistance he thinks he…
Is there a greater rags-to-riches story than Charlie Chaplin’s? A real-life tramp, Chaplin grew up dirt poor on the streets of London. The son of two destitute music hall entertainers (dad an abusive alcoholic, mom committed to a mental institution), as a child, Chaplin showed promise performing stage…
In what can be construed both as commendation and criticism, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. is assuredly a film of the times. Its contemporary grappling with hot-button issues, alongside its pointedly liminal geographic setting, enables a somewhat twofold diagnosis of political and ideological relationships, from the positions of both oppressor…
In Sean Garrity’s The End of Sex, romantic comedy only begins after the dazzling charm of first loves and first dates wears off. Enough about love at first sight, and in its place is love that is worn out by the exhausting mundanity of parenthood. The film follows…
In 2002, Laura Citarella co-founded El Pampero Cine with Mariano Llinás, Agustín Mendaliharzu, and Alejo Moguillansky. In 2011, they released Citarella’s first feature, Ostende, starring Laura Paredes, who would also go on to star in Llinás’ epic La Flor, which Citarella produced. That 14-and-a-half-hour film brought El Pampero…
The stepmother is typically an outsider role in literature. Not so in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children. Adapted from Romain Gary’s novel, Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid — which centers on a man’s infertility — Zlotowski’s latest tells a story that’s evolved to be a character study…
A beguiling amalgam of classic opera sensibility, modern dance performance, and Badlands-esque, lovers-on-the-run romantic tragedy, Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is a deeply idiosyncratic and electrifying film that nonetheless struggles to locate a governing artistic cogency. Very loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s seminal opera, Millepied’s film takes more spiritual than…
Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted is a high-concept romantic action comedy with movie stars and a decent budget that, were this 2005, would presumably have the potential to be both a hit and a tabloid item, in the vein of something similar to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (minus the whole…
Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks — The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a Shadow (1958), Man With a Shotgun (1961) — but is probably best known to contemporary audiences for his yakuza films. A relatively inhibited take on…
The Real Thing isn’t without considerable flaws, but it still allows plenty to percolate across its behemoth runtime. The unspoken commonality of all the projects that find notions of TV vs. cinema foisted upon them is their duration. Not just the cumulative length of all the episodes/installments/etc. taken…
In This Issue: FEATURES: Re-Interrogating the Body: An Interview With Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel by Ryan Akler-Bishop Dead Ringers by Igor Fishman KICKING THE CANON: Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven) by Greg Cwik // Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki) by Fred Barrett FILM REVIEWS: Beau Is Afraid…
Anthropologist-filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s work dissolves the space between their camera and their subject. Previous films Leviathan and Caniba both treat their respective subjects — the marine landscapes of commercial fishing, the domestic world of an infamous cannibal — with startling intimacy, but the proximity of…
The hardest working man in show business, otherwise known as John Swab, is back with One Day as a Lion, the director’s third feature of 2023 — and we’re not even halfway through April. But for the first time in the filmmaker’s career, script duties come courtesy of…
It’s perhaps unfair to say that divorce dramas have had too great a resurgence in recent years. The genre is by its nature a prime, extreme avenue for filmmakers to explore questions of family, separation, and bureaucracy, but this vehicle for Big Themes can frequently falter if the…
Now on her fifth feature, Rebecca Zlotowski’s films are populated with complicated women. The director has a knack for capturing doubts and quietly subverting the archetypes her characters can too neatly be boxed into. Her screenwriting credits extend beyond her directorial work, often into more transgressive territory (You…
As with so many James Mason films, in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), the actor seems an anachronism, as if his parts could have been filmed at any point in history. Across his filmography, Mason’s posh, stage-trained accent recalls a gentry class all but forgotten by American…
If Stephanie Meyer ruined emo vampires for you, how about this slightly tweaked version, wherein a vampire’s familiar walks into a Codependents Anonymous meeting? That’s the premise of Chris McKay’s Renfield, and honestly, good for him. Few relationships spring to mind as being more toxic, what with the…
Umut Subaşı’s debut feature, Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster, is a curious beast. In many regards, it’s quite accomplished, and displays some very decisive stylistic choices. It’s basically a roundelay narrative involving four young adults in Istanbul, a suitably wry comedy of manners that Subaşı orchestrates with planometric…
Reinventing the superhero genre often entails energizing it, usually with piled-on camp (as with Troma Entertainment’s The Toxic Avenger and, more recently, Marvel’s Deadpool) or pointed critique (as with Eric Kripke’s series The Boys). Typically, the assumption is that the genre needs reinventing because it’s stale, and staleness…