Mississippi Son is Charlie Musselwhite’s crowning achievement, the kind of rarified synergy of craft and content that only the most veteran practitioners can accomplish. Toward the end of Mississippi Son, Charlie Musselwhite imagines himself as a hitchhiker, young and aimless. The blues itself is personified as the driver who…
Inu-Oh Masaaki Yuasa simply can’t be stopped — or at least that’s what it has seemed like for the past two decades, during which the prolific and equally eccentric animator slowly built his iron-clad reputation alongside a definitive collection of singularly free-flowing television series that he directed, wrote,…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of…
Ali and Ava is a more formally restrained work for Barnard, but one imbued with limitless compassion and hardscrabble authenticity. Clio Barnard’s 2010 debut film The Arbor, a documentary/fiction hybrid based on the play by acclaimed writer Andrea Dunbar, features a fascinating formal gambit in which actors lip-synced…
Alone Together is but the latest reminder that Covid-inspired relationship tales reached their expiration date long ago. Relationship dramas revolving around the Covid pandemic and the early days of quarantine have proven to be, by and large, one of the worst things to afflict the film medium since…
Mr. Malcolm’s List isn’t the most chemistry-rich Regency rom-com to come along, but its modern undertones and strong ensemble work make it a recommendable entry into the en vogue subgenre. Everybody get your Regency romance bingo cards out, it’s time for Emma Holly Jones’ Mr. Malcolm’s List. An…
Swallowed Things have been building to this moment for a while, but ever since films like Julia Ducournau’s Raw crossed over to find a mainstream audience — along with the emergence of the “elevated” horror subgenre and its associated online ecosystem of video essay devotees — the term…
In some respects, My Small Land is a film about easily perceived material differences. Sarya (Lina Arashi) holds herself at a distance from others; she clips off, in conversation, all the parts of her personality and family background that could mark her as different; she does not want…
Daigo Matsui’s Just Remembering features two characters who love Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. At least, they love the first section and, specifically, Winona Ryder’s cab driver who wants to be a mechanic and not a movie star. It also features Masatoshi Nagase, who starred in Jarmusch’s Mystery…
The American cinema of the 1970s is a deep, deep well of intersecting delusion and pyrrhic victories, though hindsight has made it so that’s it become easier — and perhaps even necessary — to separate the films that indulge such disillusionment as an addendum, and those which adopt…
We Met in Virtual Reality is a formally fascinating and emotionally rich documentary that proves far more humanist than its tech-centric tagline might suggest. Joe Hunting’s debut feature film We Met in Virtual Reality is shot entirely inside VRChat, a social, virtual-reality world-building video game. His previous film,…
For a brief period of time in the early-to-mid 2000s, there was perhaps no more exciting international director than Bela Tarr. Advocates like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Susan Sontag, and J. Hoberman sang the praises of the monumental, seven-hour Satantango, at that time a phantom object of cinephilic obsession almost…
My Donkey, My Lover & I might trade too liberally in cliché, but its escapist texture, palpable charm, and refusal to give in to sexist caricature makes for a mostly winning rom-com. Those looking to indulge in the touristy flights of fancy offered by picturesque landscapes and the…
Shin Ultraman In 2016, mad genius Anno Hideaki took time off from his twenty-year-long project of remixing, remaking, revising, and reinterpreting his classic anime TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion to reboot the world’s most popular kaiju franchise with Shin Godzilla. A hit at home and an instant cult…
Edward Yang’s 1986 film Terrorizers is an opaque, elliptical portrait of overwhelming ennui in a then modern-day Taipei, and one of the earliest examples of what would become known as a “network narrative,” the everyone-is-connected storytelling technique that reached its nadir with Paul Haggis’ Crash and Alejandro González…
Jeong Ga-young has spent the past several years carving out a space for herself on the fringes of the international festival circuit with films like The Bitch on the Beach, Hit the Night, and Heart. With these meta-cinematic romantic comedies, often starring herself as a hard-drinking, straight-talking filmmaker…
Taiwanese-American filmmaker Arvin Chen’s previous two features, Au Revoir Taipei (2010) and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow (2013), are light, bubbly, visually vibrant variations on romantic comedy, populated with casts of colorful characters and peppered with musical sequences. His third feature, Mama Boy, exhibits these same qualities,…
Anything’s Possible is a well-intentioned film that is unfortunately undone by its shallow lip service and artless execution. Amazon’s new teen romance Anything’s Possible is remarkable for the fact that it’s somehow the first mainstream film to feature a transgender character as its lead. Unfortunately, this is the…
There’s a wistful touch of George Bailey to the fatefully doomed protagonist of The Executioner (El Verdugo): José Luis is a Spanish undertaker yearning to go to Germany and become a mechanic, a man with big dreams of escaping his morbid career as each and every circumstance ushers…
Kevin Gates It’s been a relatively humdrum couple of years for Kevin Gates, the bulky, burly-voiced performer who deals in big, pop-friendly melodies and stocky rap verses. He’s been MIA ever since 2016, a year that saw a surprising amount of major media hype building around the Baton…