“READ ME”: a visage lit in orange glow, hands, bodies, hands caressing bodies, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, the two words blinking mutely from a desktop screen, silence. So opens — in oneiric, inert fashion — Morvern Callar, a palimpsest of orange, beige, and grayscale, set to the disquieting…
What makes a great writer? Romantics and bookworms might wax poetic about unparalleled emotional insight or the fearless plumbing of the human condition, but pragmatists (and publishers) know the real answer: the secret to a great writer is a great editor. Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary Turn Every Page: The…
Simply put: Julia Wu has established herself as one of the most consistent artists of the decade so far. The Australian-Chinese singer-songwriter has put out an album every year since 2019 (and more before that) — the mixed Mandarin and English 5 am in 2019, its entirely English…
The ’60s and ’70s were a highly politically-charged time for Italian cinema. The country’s neorealism movement chronicled working class lives in a post-WWII Italy — a newly post-fascist society still reeling from the fallout of the deadliest, most devastating conflict in human history. But unlike these grounded proletarian dramas, films like Ettore…
Rarely does the weight of a classic so gracefully crimp under the weightlessness of an earnest successor, less keen on displacing the gravitas of the original than it is to enchant the world with renewed splendor. In Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, thought by many to be the director’s crowning…
If the recent High Heat represents a kind of floor for a DTV genre work — some perfect okay action courtesy of a game cast with a weak screenplay but professional production values — Black Warrant resides somewhere in the basement. Wholly generic, the film is a paint-by-numbers…
Tucked into the lap of the tributaries of the Euphrates River, the city of Babylon once towered. Hammurabi, who conquered the entirety of Southern Mesopotamia, made Babylon his capital as the extent of his conquest had now made the fertile city the center of the new Babylonian Empire.…
In her overview of lesbian-feminist criticism, Bonnie Zimmerman urged lesbian critics to look into “what has been unspoken and barely imagined” in order to envision what has never been. What makes establishing a lesbian historiography doubly difficult, however, is that the truth is not so much unspoken but…
Of the so-called “three amigos” — comprising Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu — whose films have in recent years penetrated the international stage both critically and commercially, Iñárritu arguably has also generated the greatest controversy. This should come as no surprise: where Cuarón and…
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…