A fluff-piece out two months before its prime time, About Fate is a lukewarm entry into the holiday rom-com catalog. For a romantic comedy, About Fate is about as generic a title as they come, and it certainly matches the film that follows, a predictable slice of milquetoast pap…

OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of…

Winter Boy Those about to eulogize reach for poetry; for anyone, mourning periods commingle, confuse, and unpredictably change one’s experience of time. But in Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy (La lycéen), the director applies a stripped-down approach. While his curatorial touches are still all over the playlist (‘80s new-wave…

The Whale Although The Whale is an adaptation of the 2012 stage play by MacArthur Fellowship-winner Samuel D. Hunter, the film tends to feel of a piece with director Darren Aronofsky’s peak “auteur era,” at least more than anything else he’s made in quite some time. In particular,…

Glass Onion Rian Johnson’s latest stab at Wes Anderson-does-Clue has a lesser cast, a more pandering script, and a wholly phony “Eat the Rich” political angle. Thankfully, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery also has the same sleuth from the first Knives Out, and Daniel Craig is just…

Confess, Fletch isn’t attempting much, but it lands as an amiable bit of diet-Soderbergh primed for a low-key weekend binge. We all complain about what movies belong in theaters and argue the idea that streaming is deleterious to the cinematic experience, but occasionally something comes along that seems destined…

Clerks III is a fans-only venture that’s sunk by a childishness devoid of wonder and poignant moments consistently undermined by self-mockery. In Arthur Penn’s 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, a single moment begat New Hollywood. Warren Beatty’s Clyde, panicking during a botched robbery, shoots the persistent bank manager, an innocent…

Padre Pio Disclaimer: It’s important to acknowledge the severity of the accusations of abuse made against both Shia LaBeouf and Asia Argento, and clarify that while some of the language used in this review might not do justice to the weight of these allegations, no word written here…

Huang Ji is among the last handful of Chinese directors to sneak through the portal distribution company dGenerate Films, the center of an important 2000s artistic nexus in Chinese cinema (also including Rotterdam & Locarno film festivals) that was able to facilitate an entry point for alternative and…

Brahmāstra Part One: Shiva is a soulless mega-franchise starter that does very little of interest with its massive budget. Chances are, you already know what you’re getting yourself into with Brahmāstra Part One: Shiva. How could you not? It’s so larger-than-life that you can’t not know about it;…

Master Gardener In hindsight, Paul Schrader’s career has been a repeated jettisoning and reappropriation of extraneous artiness, new off-kilter filmic shapes of inscrutable quality emerging at an otherwise reliable clip, especially this past decade. 2017’s First Reformed, something of a critical watershed, is the ostensible perfect result of…

It’s the pillowing warmth of nostalgia, which sporadically rears its head that it may provide orientation and affirm consciousness amidst historical chaos, that makes up the body of Antonio Lukich’s sophomore feature. Luxembourg, Luxembourg is a romantic ache in the tale of twins Kolya and Vasylii (Amil and…

When Robert Zemeckis set about making preparations for his adaptation of Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary Marwencol, he was immediately confronted with a potentially project-killing conundrum. This was back in 2013, almost a full decade after Zemeckis had made his first major foray into mo-cap-based, CG filmmaking with The…

In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to, if not prominence, then a certain level of respect for his next two films. Flight, in some ways, made sense: Denzel Washington being as…

“Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.”   — James Cameron When Avatar hit cinema screens in 2009, the reception it garnered was unprecedented even in retrospect. The film’s raison d’etre, it would seem, hinged…

Loving Adults is visually impressive and sporadically interesting, but sacrifices the necessary character depth for this type of film at the altar of melodramatic plot construction. Danish director Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg’s latest film, Loving Adults, adapts Anna Ekberg’s romantic psychodrama of the same name published in 2017. The film is…

In the 25 years since Robert Zemeckis released Contact, the search for extraterrestrials has moved from fringe conspiracy theory to a matter of national security. Earlier this year, the Pentagon even created an official bureau to investigate the phenomena, known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Is…

Three Thousand Years of Longing presents a fairly stimulating academic study in its early going, but ultimately fails to balance its conceptual and emotional aims. In brief outline, the premise of Three Thousand Years of Longing, George Miller’s long-awaited follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road, sounds like the…

Though the vast majority of Robert Zemeckis’ films are family-friendly, it’s also easy to find cruelty and blatant sexuality in nearly all of them, the two often intermingled. It might be easy to identify the incestual overtones of Lorraine Baines-McFly’s advances on her future son as a cringeworthy…

For a film whose subject is one of the most famous events in the history of American popular culture, Robert Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand is actually quite intimate. It’s less concerned with representing the scale of the Beatles’ cultural influence, and more interested in the emotional…

I’m not sure people entirely remember the film Audition. Like much of his body of work, director Takashi Miike’s breakthrough into global recognition is perhaps best remembered for its transgressive, stomach-churning imagery, in particular its propulsive final act. Like a lot of horror movies that gained notoriety in…