After the massive success of John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian in 1982, an avalanche of cheap sword-and-sorcery pictures flowed forth, eager to cash in on the newly viable genre. Never one to miss out on an emerging box office trend (and running out of ideas for Alien knock-offs),…
No Other Choice “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Frederic Jameson No one seems to enjoy the world we live in — in fact, everyone seems to hate it. Yet most of us accept it, see it as the…
Coming to NYFF by way of the Giornate degli Artori in Venice, Gabriel Azorín’s debut feature is a bold swing for the fences, the sort of challenging and ambitious film that ought to be more common from first-timers. To say that Azorín’s reach exceeds his grasp is no…
Blue Moon Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of the filmmaker’s scrappy, discursive gab-fests as it does a conventional biopic. Almost entirely confined to a tavern location, presented mostly in real-time and…
“All films are time travel films, and all films are ghost films,” said filmmaker Mark Jenkin at a post-screening Q&A for the New York Film Festival premiere of his new film, Rose of Nevada. This sentiment certainly applies to Jenkin’s films, preoccupied as they are with cycles that…
The streets of Beirut are covered in red dirt. Mounds of earth make up barricades along the highway, cars duck around the man-made mountains as they amble down the road. The Lebanese Civil War has been raging for 10 years, and somehow Jocelyne Saab was able to make…
Dracula Radu Jude is aiming for nothing less than the grand finale of vampire movies with his Dracula, and as a Romanian, why shouldn’t he lay claim to his heritage? This sprawling three-hour epic opens with a parade of A.I.-generated Vlad the Impalers telling us to suck their…
With the ever prolific Romanian auteur delivering banger after banger at breakneck speed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that 2025 is another hallmark year for Radu Jude. Hot off the heels of the Berlinale premiere of what you might call his riff on social realism…
For better or worse, Brett Goldstein is always — or at least for the far foreseeable future — going to be associated with his Ted Lasso character, Roy Kent. As Kent, he was grumpy, hot-headed, and, while time ultimately demonstrated his softer side, an overall rough personality. At…
The Mastermind Of Kelly Reichardt’s many talents behind the camera, historically, she is not a filmmaker you would refer to as “a trickster” — there is little in the way of twist or misdirection in her work. She is, however, a deconstructionist of genre, frequently the Western, but…
In 1974, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (henceforth EAAJAF) followed in the footsteps of the Japanese Red Army by committing several terrorist acts in order to shake up a conformist Japanese society that refused to acknowledge, much less reckon with, the sins of its immediate past. Like…
It’s a shame I had to see Kent Jones’ Willem Dafoe vehicle, Late Fame, on the Upper West Side at NYFF in mid-September. It was in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong time of year. Late Fame descends from a proud tradition of lovely films by the likes of…
The story begins twice: once with newspaper headlines informing us that Antoine Monnier’s young Charles has died mysteriously, and then we go back to six months prior, with Charles discussing proper walking technique to avoid wear and tear on shoes. It’s arguably the pettiest example of Charles believing…
The biography of an artist is an artist’s nemesis. It aims a howitzer at artists and the body of their work. In its illuminating, explicatory nature, it renders legible what had seemed sui generis; in reams of helpful context, it forces its subject into a set of coordinates,…
There is a futility to championing ideas which, once derided, have now been vindicated by the zeitgeist, in the same way that the idea of seeking innermost truth against the illusory grain is easily written off as vain. Both definitions of vanity apply here: present order, if nothing…
Writer-director Carmen Emmi, inspired in part by a 2016 L.A. Times article detailing a sting operation by undercover police officers at a popular cruising site in Long Beach, made his debut feature Plainclothes with a specific question in mind: “what happens when you police your feelings?” Set in…
Sirāt “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The question is posed from one beleaguered raver to another, on a school bus somewhere on the south side of the Atlas Mountains, hopefully approaching Mauritania. Sirāt, Óliver Laxe’s latest, is effectively a road movie toward this…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome as circumscribed by the city’s major beltway. Fire at Sea (2016) considered the refugee crisis by focusing on life on the island of…
Excepting the newly bicurious and the chronically polyamorous, most people will adore Erupcja for the wrong reasons. Pete Ohs’ sixth narrative feature has, on the surface, all the ingredients ripe for distilling the contemporary formula for earth-shaking passion. It stars Charli XCX, centers those of a sapphic persuasion,…
Bouchra Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker living in New York, and her mother Aicha, a painter who lives in Casablanca. Some time in the past, Bouchra had sent…
Unlike the two other entries in Dag Johan Haugerud’s thematically linked Love-Sex-Dreams trilogy, Dreams is not concerned with steadily paced dialogues or mature perspectives. While the fact it won the Golden Bear, awarded by a jury headed by Todd Haynes, might suggest some kind of new queer cinema…