Bones and All isn’t successful across the board, but it thankfully prioritizes Guadagnino’s strengths and results in arguably his finest film. Nearly six years out from its Sundance premiere, Call Me by Your Name has seen its cultural reputation dimmed considerably amidst revelations of star Armie Hammer’s unsavory predilections,…
Septet: The Story of Hong Kong The subtitle for Septet: The Story of Hong Kong isn’t an all that accurate reflection of the omnibus’s breadth: These seven short films do span a robust 70 years, from the 1950s (Sammo Hung’s Exercise) to the 2020s (Tsui Hark’s Conversation in…
The subtitle for Septet: The Story of Hong Kong isn’t an all that accurate reflection of the omnibus’s breadth: These seven short films do span a robust 70 years, from the 1950s (Sammo Hung’s Exercise) to the 2020s (Tsui Hark’s Conversation in Depth), but since nearly all of…
Actual People captures actual truths about the ways that young people behave. Kit Zauhar follows up her promising short film, Helicopter, with an equally talky debut feature. Actual People is an episodic chronicle of a failed graduation, as Riley (Zauhar) finds her life — or her hopes for it…
Nothing Lasts Forever is a zippy but patient task-taking doc on the ills, myths, and hypocrisies of the global diamond industry. In 1929, the Surrealist painter René Magritte cheekily told viewers that a pipe is not a pipe, inviting audiences to interrogate the difference between an object and the…
Midnights is stuck somewhere between Taylor Swift’s classic pop textures and recent dreamy minimalism, to disappointing ends. As an unabashedly pop record, Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights invokes the bold aesthetic statements that she sought to make on 1989, Reputation, and Lover. Her most recent original albums before…
Causeway is a sturdy enough film with fine anchoring performances, but it doesn’t otherwise boast much in the way of substance. It’s been some time since we’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence step into a dramatic role quite like the one offered in Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway. Lawrence, who spent many years…
My Policeman is a beige, two-hour yawn that fails to live up to superior works occupying the same thematic space. Harry Styles kept finding himself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons this fall. First, there was the troubled production history of Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, whose…
Something in the Dirt is a formidable DIY effort bearing Benson & Moorhead’s expected formal ingenuity, but it’s unfortunately all in service of a rather trite subject. DIY genre auteurs Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are back, delivering another trippy two-hander. Across the past decade, these two have built…
Raymond and Ray, while patiently contemplative, plays it too safe as a dramedy of life’s joys and sorrows. The story of estranged siblings in search of a lost or deceased parent who gradually reunite along the way should be very familiar to most viewers, for it’s a narrative…
Ticket to Paradise is an entirely charmless rom-com fronted by a poisonous couple and sleepwalking its way through bland genre tropes. How hard could it possibly be to make an amusing enough romantic comedy fueled by two gigantic movie stars with historical chemistry? Ask Ol Parker, the writer and…
Peter Hedges brings his typical schtick to The Same Storm, getting off to a rocky start but ultimately getting somewhere heartwarming enough. Is there any filmmaker working today as uncool as Peter Hedges? The writer-director has made a career out of crafting tales of familial strife so earnest in…
Ballerini’s latest leans into her strength as a writer, and builds upon her previous works in a welcome fashion. Subject to Change is country singer-songwriter Kelsea Ballerini’s fourth album, and likely her best yet. It follows 2020’s kelsea, which was too often bogged down by clichés with tracks…
Decision to Leave piles on the plot twists, but never loses its essential noir romance vibe. Tang Wei remains one of the great actresses of our time, here building another variation on the femme fatale role, one entirely different from the one she played in Bi Gan’s 2018 Long…
Summit Fever could have climbed to better heights, but it’s base-level take leaves it just a cheesy, overlong mess. With rock-climbing films steadily entering the mainstream over the past few years, it was only a matter of time before the flurry of prestige entries fizzled into B-movie territory.…
Stars at Noon is the perfect externalization of a lovers-on-the-run experience, a fitting send-up to its source material. A gnarled, lightbulb-spotted, two-dimensional plastic facsimile of a red palm tree in an empty plaza and a close-up of Margaret Qualley’s face are the introductory images of Claire Denis’ Stars At…
The Swimmer is yet another skin-thin film about gay men that is unfortunately more interested in titillation than characterization. The Israeli gay coming-of-age drama The Swimmer arrives one week after Bros, a big-budget studio comedy that attempted to woo mainstream audiences by taking the framework of your basic romantic…
Walk Up Walk Up is Hong Sang-soo’s trickiest film since The Day After (2017), and his most intricately structured effort since The Day He Arrives (2012). With the former it shares lead actor Kwon Haehyo, who here plays a middle-aged director named Byung-soo. With the latter it shares…
Bros is a would be rom-com lacking in comedy, chemistry, and untroubled rhetoric on gay culture. First off, the good news: director/co-writer Nicholas Stoller’s Bros is a gay romantic comedy that avoids anything resembling the familiar narrative arcs of tragedy or the pitfalls of coming out, and features a…
Dead for a Dollar is another failed Western outing from Walter Hill, a well-intentioned but visually shoddy film that sags whenever its action disappears. After his previous excursion into the genre, 1995’s Wild Bill, drew a mixed response, legendary filmmaker Walter Hill once again takes aim at the Western…