Now on her fifth feature, Rebecca Zlotowski’s films are populated with complicated women. The director has a knack for capturing doubts and quietly subverting the archetypes her characters can too neatly be boxed into. Her screenwriting credits extend beyond her directorial work, often into more transgressive territory (You…
As with so many James Mason films, in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), the actor seems an anachronism, as if his parts could have been filmed at any point in history. Across his filmography, Mason’s posh, stage-trained accent recalls a gentry class all but forgotten by American…
If Stephanie Meyer ruined emo vampires for you, how about this slightly tweaked version, wherein a vampire’s familiar walks into a Codependents Anonymous meeting? That’s the premise of Chris McKay’s Renfield, and honestly, good for him. Few relationships spring to mind as being more toxic, what with the…
Umut Subaşı’s debut feature, Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster, is a curious beast. In many regards, it’s quite accomplished, and displays some very decisive stylistic choices. It’s basically a roundelay narrative involving four young adults in Istanbul, a suitably wry comedy of manners that Subaşı orchestrates with planometric…
Reinventing the superhero genre often entails energizing it, usually with piled-on camp (as with Troma Entertainment’s The Toxic Avenger and, more recently, Marvel’s Deadpool) or pointed critique (as with Eric Kripke’s series The Boys). Typically, the assumption is that the genre needs reinventing because it’s stale, and staleness…
On a personal note, Rye Lane couldn’t have come at a more significant time. I only recently moved away from South London, and have started to feel homesick for the exact places that Raine Allen-Miller’s debut feature film captures so lovingly. It’s not just that I’ve spent time…
In May 2022, Andy Fletcher — the keyboard player and one of the founding members of the prestigious British synth-pop/electronic rock group Depeche Mode — passed away after a tragic battle with aortic dissection, leaving the remaining duo of Dave Gahan and Martin Gore in deep shock and…
In Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, the unnamed protagonist (Mary Woodvine, in a role mysteriously dubbed “The Volunteer”) sets out on a mundane, quietly transfixing routine. Her daily tasks include observing a rare and unnamed cluster of flowers, transcribing her observations into a logbook, throwing a rock down an…
In This Issue: FEATURES: good. honest. fun. : An Interview With Ratboys’ Julia Steiner by Nick Seip SXSW 2023: Only the Good Survive (Dutch Southern) by Luke Gorham // Fremont (Babak Jalali) by Jesse Catherine Webber // Bloody Hell (Molly McGlynn) by Ayeen Forootan // Kite Zo…
Despite the French New Wave being widely considered obsolete by the 1980s, all of its directors remained active, finding varying degrees of success in adapting to the dramatically shifting political world around them. Jean-Luc Godard found himself reborn after a decade of alienating fans with a bombardment of…
For an era-defining band like 100 gecs — singer/producers Dylan Brady and Laura Les — it’s surprising that so few conversations about the group tend to involve talking about their actual music. gecs’ debut album, 1000 gecs — one of the final masterpieces of the 2010s — was…
Outside the confines of polite Parisian society, there lies a wild west on wheels, in a subculture known as the urban rodeo. Though participation is criminalized and heavily criticized, the exhilarating, and dangerous, motorbike subculture at the center of Rodeo acts as a catalyst for community. This is…
Just as rock music has fallen out of fashion, Yves Tumor has become increasingly insistent on performing it. What does it mean to become a rock star, dripping swagger and larger-than-life mystique, in an age where achieving actual mass popularity playing this kind of music is almost impossible?…
The latest film from French actor-director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is difficult to evaluate. One could argue that, for what it is, it is fairly accomplished. A showcase for mostly young talent, including some performers making their film debut, Forever Young is exuberantly melodramatic, the film’s form matching its protagonists’…
Three Nights a Week is less the love story between a straight man and a drag queen it has been billed as, and rather a love letter to a subculture and the invitations that it opens. Photographer Baptiste (Pablo Pauly) is ostensibly straight. He visits a World AIDS…
Naomi Kawase’s 2014 romance drama Still the Water is never short on striking imagery. Set in Amami Ôshima, an island off the southern coast of the Japanese mainland, the film is overflowing with beautiful shots of crashing waves, misty mountains, and painterly sunsets. A particularly memorable sequence early…
When Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was against the backdrop of a roiling and mostly insufferable online debate about “age gap,” coinciding with social media discovering P.T. Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. That film famously features a romantic, albeit nonsexual,…
From its first frames, Rikiya Imaizumi’s Call Me Chihiro is easily identifiable as a Netflix original. Adapted from Hiroyuki Yasuda’s manga Chihiro-san, the film’s flat, textureless cinematography and crisp digital sheen carry the signifiers associated with the kind of streaming dross that any discerning cinephile would avoid like…
Writer-director Christopher Landon has made a career out of taking some of the most tired and shopworn genre plots imaginable and infusing them with a welcome sense of self-awareness that, while not always resulting in great films, consistently delivers the goods entertainment-wise, from the Groundhog Day-inspired Happy Death…
A young woman from Tokyo finds herself in a strange town. In the beginning, she is looking for a tourist site, the ruins of an old castle perhaps, but all she finds are empty fields. Wandering around, she’s invited to play soccer with some kids, but soon they…