Argentinian filmmaker Gustavo Fontán has produced fourteen feature films since 2003, but still hasn’t broken through on the film festival circuit in a substantial way. This is perhaps odd, given the attention that Argentina has received from the film world in the last two decades. But judging from…
Released in 2006 to mixed reviews and respectable, if unremarkable, box office, Déjà Vu was the third collaboration (of an eventual five) between director Tony Scott and superstar Denzel Washington. A slick, propulsive thriller, Déjà Vu has gradually amassed a reputation as one of Scott’s very best works.…
It goes without saying that the city of Paris, more than any other megalopolis, has — as a constant of film history — provided an unending range of both visual and narrative fodder, and also embodied a certain characteristic that can not only present itself as a milieu,…
Historically held in low-regard, the coming-of-age comedy (or, to be less discrete, the teen sex comedy) has long served as a useful snapshot of the culture’s evolving anxieties and shifting mores. From the anti-authority thumb in the eye of National Lampoon’s Animal House to the post-(Bill)Clinton public dissemination…
Jon Hamm and Tina Fey, two of the most beloved television actors of the 21st century, have been orbiting each other for so long that it’s a little surprising they haven’t shared more screen time together. Hamm famously appeared in a multi-episode arc of 30 Rock as a…
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…