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…
Spoon Though we are emerging from Q1 2022 on shaky ground globally speaking, this recent past has already been canonized as a banner micro-era elsewhere in certain Internet music circles, with new albums from ascendant acts like Big Thief and Black Country, New Road (and a returning old…
Love Sux finds Avril Lavigne blending her punk and bubblegum influences to the best effect in ages. When Let Go, Avril Lavigne’s debut album, was released twenty years ago, it arrived with the force of an earthquake. The artist was immediately distinguished from contemporaries like the Backstreet Boys or…
Avril Lavigne When Let Go, Avril Lavigne’s debut album, was released twenty years ago, it arrived with the force of an earthquake. The artist was immediately distinguished from contemporaries like the Backstreet Boys or the Spice Girls: rather than the “manufactured” pop that dominated the late ‘90s and…
Cha Cha Real Smooth With only two features under his belt, 24-year-old writer/director/leading man/wunderkind Cooper Raiff has already developed an idiosyncratic style that can most accurately be characterized as “deeply uncool.” Where fellow filmmakers of his age tend to traffic in hyper-stylized edge and empty provocation, Raiff is…
Timelessness is a crucial thing of nature — where sediments erode and seas dry, nature par excellence remains unchanged, a totality to reckon with, yet itself, by virtue of how all who do so are situated within it, unreckonable. To promulgate such a thesis is to do little…
Panama is a muddled and befuddling film, offering a few choice Neveldine aesthetic choices but otherwise exhibiting a confused embrace of cliché. Intended as a temporary career adjustment, the fracturing of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s directorial partnership has held fast since 2011’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which…
Întregalde is a humble, human-scaled story expertly told and sure to be one of the best films of the year. Radu Muntean might not be as well known in the U.S. as his Romanian New Wave compatriots Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, or Corneliu Porumboiu, but he’s been putting together a…
It’s easy to ride Love After Love’s opulent wave of aimlessness for a while, but it eventually all becomes too exhausting. Love After Love is director Ann Hui’s third adaptation of a story by Eileen Chang, following 1984’s Love in a Fallen City and 1997’s Eighteen Springs. I…