Writer-director Emmanuelle Nicot’s Love According to Dalva opens with the titular character (Zelda Samson) being violently separated from her father in their own home at the hands of police. Adorned in glitzy evening attire and a heavy smattering of make-up, it’s only in the following scene, at a…
Pacifiction A favorite at Cannes for several years now, self-styled arthouse rockstar Albert Serra has had a dependable home th festival since his (narrative) debut feature Honor de Cavalleria back in 2006. That film, a minimalist reimagining of Don Quixote starring nonprofessional actors and rendered in surprisingly lush…
A favorite at Cannes for several years now, self-styled arthouse rockstar Albert Serra has had a dependable home at the festival since his (narrative) debut feature Honor de Cavalleria back in 2006. That film, a minimalist reimagining of Don Quixote starring nonprofessional actors and rendered in surprisingly lush…
Don Juan Serge Bozon’s follow-up to Madame Hyde (2017), Don Juan seems to continue that film’s revisionist update of a classic tale, while also returning in some fashion to the unorthodox musical genre that La France (2007) so brilliantly embodied. Here, the connection is much more narratively explicit: Laurent…
Final Cut Though remakes of beloved films are usually met with some degree of warranted skepticism, sometimes the combination of director and material is too enticing to ignore. News that Korean zombie hit Train to Busan would receive an American remake was received with expected derision, but that…
Deception should have been prime, loopy material for Desplechin, but instead remains frustratingly staid, only occasionally capturing the spark of his more personal material. A long pursued passion project, Arnaud Desplechin’s latest picture adapts Philip Roth’s 1990 slippery, erotic novel, Deception, into cinematic form for the first time.…
B.I.B.L.E. is evidence that the past year’s features king is only grinding for superstardom, sanding down any Brooklyn drill edges in favor of bland studio polish. “I’m fightin’ my demons while fuckin’ this demon,” Fivio Foreign claims on the Kanye West tribute track “Through the Fire” (the song…
A deeply personal record of disillusionment and quiet rage, Skinty Fia is easily Fontaines D.C.’s most adventurous work yet. The 2010s brought with them an international post-punk renaissance which spawned a plethora of noteworthy acts such as German punk poets Messer, English dada-druggies Fat White Family, and American…
Fivio Foreign “I’m fightin’ my demons while fuckin’ this demon,” Fivio Foreign claims on the Kanye West tribute track “Through the Fire” (the song even interpolates Chaka Khan, how subtle). This turn of phrase — so simple, so efficient; a little fresh, but pure in intent — is…
In Front of Your Face is a spiritual awakening of a film, tweaking Hong’s particular tenor from the past decade into something even more penetrating and melancholy. The films of Hong Sang-soo, ever so magical yet construed from the affairs of quotidian encounters, every minimal gesture compounding a maximal…
Montana Story is a notably tender film, patient both in its flaying of old wounds and in sewing seeds of healing. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Montana Story is a somber, gentle neo-Western set in the achingly beautiful Paradise Valley, where Big Sky Country is punctuated by snow-capped…
Operation Mincemeat is precisely the kind of stolid history flick your dad will probably like but which bears little artistry to otherwise meaningfully distinguish itself. Stories from the halls of power need not all be dull — look no further than Armando Iannucci’s 2017 political satire The Death…
There’s something irresistible about the romantic self-obsessive. If asked, most people would probably not rank their love lives as the most interesting facet of their existence, and yet art that focuses on nothing but romance endures. It’s why we indulge in tabloid gossip and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and…
Lake Forest Park The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with the violent death of a classmate.” Viewers might be forgiven for missing this pertinent bit of information, which is relayed via a news radio…
I read the original Dell Abyss paperback of Kathe Koja’s classic debut novel The Cipher in my early twenties. Koja’s voice immediately reignited my excitement about the power endemic to horror fiction. I was in awe of her urgent and singular perspective, her acrobatic prose style, her expert…
Reflection lacks the scale of Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, but its brutalist Wes Anderson-esque tenor makes for a difficult yet still hopeful study of war. While Ukrainian writer/director Valentin Vasyanovych has been making films for a number of years, his breakthrough didn’t come until 2019’s Atlantis, which garnered awards at several…
Inbetween Girl manages to avoid the tepid dramatics of so many teen-screen films, but too often succumbs to bouts of preciousness and self-conscious affectation. The problem with so many teen movies is that they shape themselves according to shallow extremes of adolescent feeling, and specifically of young romance. There’s…
Fiddler’s Journey isn’t much more substantive than your average love letter doc, and suffers from an ill-conceived late-film detour. Daniel Raim’s chronicling of the pre-production and production processes of Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on the Roof is a meagerly informative expositional work that can’t quite jettison those industry-pushed aspirational faculties…
Bubble is an altogether gentler anime product for Araki, aiming for the emotional stakes of films like Your Name, but is slight to the point of inconsequence. For director Tetsurō Araki, Bubble represents something new. The director is best known for a few edgy anime series aimed at teen…
The Sound of Violet is a deeply out of touch, frequently offensive bit of nonsense that is best left unwatched. Phrases like “unbelievable” and “batshit insane” get bandied about by critics — this one included — so regularly that they have virtually lost all meaning, the inclination to traffic…