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…
Netflix’s new romantic comedy Your Place or Mine got a shot in the arm publicity-wise this past week when photos from its premiere went viral on social media. Unfortunately for the streaming giant, it was for all the wrong reasons, as stars Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher were…
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…