There’s nothing much profound going on in Anaïs in Love, but its languorous, late-summer tenor makes for a lightly pleasant watch. A warm, sandy romance harking back to simpler times, Anaïs in Love revels in a simplicity uncommon for (increasingly competitive) debut films. Anaïs Demoustier plays a young…
Unbearable Weight is the latest high-concept, one-joke movie, but it’s thankfully a funny enough joke to justify the film’s existence. Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Cage — actually, Nick Cage — in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a cheeky, sweet-natured comedy that can’t help but insist that…
Paris, 13th District succeeds in communicating something distinctly, relatably human, even as it falters to present captivating drama. There’s something particularly soul-crushing about being lonely in a metropolis. An environment meant to socially concentrate instead atomizes. Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District begins silently, a gliding overhead shot tracking…
Crash isn’t reinventing the dance-music wheel, but it’s still an energetic and enjoyable listen that highlights Charli’s talent for hooky pop. Charli has been at the forefront of pop for nearly a decade, consistently stretching the genre for the casual listener. From the dark pop of True Romance…
Charli XCX Charli has been at the forefront of pop for nearly a decade, consistently stretching the genre for the casual listener. From the dark pop of True Romance to the hyperpop garblings of how i’m feeling now, Charli has never sat still, always challenging herself to find…
A deeply spiritual, even existential, odyssey that mingles numerous contradictory forces into a striking whole, The Tale of King Crab is certain to be remembered as one of the year’s best films. After a very brief intro, The Tale of King Crab (originally, Re Granchio) opens on a group…
Aline is an undeniably singular film, but its eccentricities are mostly gloss on an overly-familiar biopic template. The new musical drama Aline is officially described in its marketing materials as “A fiction freely inspired by the life of Celine Dion,” a fact which anyone with functioning eyes could deduce…
Poppy Field carries the veneer of importance but isn’t much more than a series of lazy ironies, a shallow character study in need of a character. Over the past 15 years, Romania has firmly staked its claim on the international film scene, with such bold, acclaimed features as 4…
All the Old Knives is a DOA old-school espionage thriller that only succeeds in proving how wasted Chris Pine is. Sporting quite possibly one of the worst titles to grace a film in ages, All the Old Knives comes courtesy of Amazon Studios, its Prime streaming service as appropriate…
The Girl and the Spider is a bit of a symphony of sights and sounds that occasionally plays like too much of a recapitulation of The Strange Little Cat. Like their previous collaboration, 2013’s The Strange Little Cat, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider is best…
Capturing the fuzzy conceptual and materialist fluidity of modern globalization has become something of a go-to subject for contemporary non-fiction film. It’s a huge, even abstract, phenomenon with almost limitless possibilities and variations to explore. Sean Wang’s A Marble Travelogue is the latest entry in this burgeoning subgenre, exploring the…
Come Here Over the past twelve years, Anocha Suwichakornpong has developed one of the more elusive and protean bodies of work on the festival circuit. Seven years after her auspicious debut, Mundane History (2009), a destabilizing, achronological story of the burgeoning friendship between a sullen upper-class young man…
In 1962, the great Scottish-Canadian film theorist John Grierson gave a talk at the University of North Carolina on his seminal period in 1920s USA, an era during which he coined the term “documentary” in a review of Nanook of the North and subsequently began a collaboration with…
Squirrels to the Nuts may not rise to the level of salvaged masterpiece, but it breezily reasserts the legacy and artistry of Peter Bogdanovich. The rediscovery of Squirrels to the Nuts, Peter Bogdanovich’s original cut of the film that, under the title of She’s Funny That Way, became his…
Gagarine is a small film, but one impressive in the balance of wonder and stark melancholy it conjures. Against the harsh realities of time and neglect, the idealism of the 1960s has all but entirely faded. Brutalist apartment blocks and optimistic notions that social housing could provide a…
One of the most paradoxically romantic scenes in any film ever can be found in Alexander Mackendrick’s second film for Ealing Studios, 1951’s The Man in the White Suit. In this scene, Joan Greenwood visibly falls in love with Alec Guinness when he unloads a heap of scientific…
Moonshot never takes off, any potential low-key rom-com pleasures undercut by a flattened sense of conflict and by-the-numbers plotting. Once a reliable Hollywood staple, the romantic comedy no longer commands the pop-cultural preeminence of its heyday. Blame craven executives, blame entertainment economics, blame finicky audiences — the jury’s still…
Everything Everywhere All at Once, true to its title, can be a little chaotic and unruly, but it’s still a hilarious and impeccably crafted bit of invention that lands more often than it falters. It’s been a while since there was a more aptly titled movie than Everything Everywhere…
By the time of Taboo’s 1999 release, after a 13-year period of filmic silence, Nagisa Ôshima had already released what could be considered two capstone projects for the varying, protean strands of his zigzagging career. In 1983 came the English-language Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a WWII melodrama of…
Babi Yar. Context is another notable work from Loznitsa, one that represents an important act of remembrance while also remaining frustratingly vague and lacking in, ironically, context. Beginning in September 1941, German soldiers massacred somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people at the Babi Yar ravine outside of Kiev, capital…
Clocking in at 84 minutes, Once Twice Melody retains Beach Houses’ incredible knack for wistful pop melody. While any number of their contemporaries have stumbled and faded, or at the very least, committed themselves to performing exclusively for an increasingly niche, aging audience, Beach House miraculously remains widely popular and relatively…