There are so few solid, meat-and-potatoes American action films every year that get studio resources and an actual theatrical release that one is almost…
Much has changed in the world over the past 10 years. A worsening environmental crisis has decimated the way of life for millions of…
It’s hard to read, let alone write, a piece of film criticism today that doesn’t talk about the lack of creativity in the industry.…
Titles are a funny thing. Adapted from a 2020 novel of the same name, Eli Craig’s horror-comedy Clown in a Cornfield takes the same tact as…
It makes sense that Joel Potrykus has remained a Michigan filmmaker his entire career. His rebellious, don’t-ask-permission attitude is right at home in a…
Underground Kaori Oda’s Underground is a film built around the meanings of its title, but it’s also apparently built up to 83 minutes out…
After a rich and varied March release landscape, April came back down to Earth a bit. There were still exciting, under-the-radar releases (Gazer, Henry…
In 2001, Jia Zhangke made Unknown Pleasures, in which Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao Qiao who tries to make a living as…
A cascading slant of coastal daylight betrays the futile dangers of vacation time in Durga Chew-Bose’s sensual, stilling, and elegiac rendition of Françoise Sagan’s…
There are few genuinely pleasurable elements in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses. Adapted by Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name,…
In Fire Island, director Andrew Ahn and writer/actor Joel Kim Booster retrofitted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not just as a means to reflect…
In 1971, legendary rock artists and power couple John Lennon and Yoko Ono left their estate in London and moved to New York. For…
After 2021’s El Planeta, Amalia Ulman ups the ante with her second feature, Magic Farm, in every conceivable way. Black-and-white cinematography here gives way…
About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid.…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy…
With his latest feature, director Robert Schwentke has moved away from his Time Traveler’s Wife, Divergent, Snake Eyes-days of bad blockbuster filmmaking. Seneca —…
A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches…
Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A…