Lake Forest Park The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with the violent death of a classmate.” Viewers might be forgiven for missing this pertinent bit of information, which is relayed via a news radio…
I read the original Dell Abyss paperback of Kathe Koja’s classic debut novel The Cipher in my early twenties. Koja’s voice immediately reignited my excitement about the power endemic to horror fiction. I was in awe of her urgent and singular perspective, her acrobatic prose style, her expert…
Reflection lacks the scale of Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, but its brutalist Wes Anderson-esque tenor makes for a difficult yet still hopeful study of war. While Ukrainian writer/director Valentin Vasyanovych has been making films for a number of years, his breakthrough didn’t come until 2019’s Atlantis, which garnered awards at several…
Inbetween Girl manages to avoid the tepid dramatics of so many teen-screen films, but too often succumbs to bouts of preciousness and self-conscious affectation. The problem with so many teen movies is that they shape themselves according to shallow extremes of adolescent feeling, and specifically of young romance. There’s…
Fiddler’s Journey isn’t much more substantive than your average love letter doc, and suffers from an ill-conceived late-film detour. Daniel Raim’s chronicling of the pre-production and production processes of Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on the Roof is a meagerly informative expositional work that can’t quite jettison those industry-pushed aspirational faculties…
Bubble is an altogether gentler anime product for Araki, aiming for the emotional stakes of films like Your Name, but is slight to the point of inconsequence. For director Tetsurō Araki, Bubble represents something new. The director is best known for a few edgy anime series aimed at teen…
The Sound of Violet is a deeply out of touch, frequently offensive bit of nonsense that is best left unwatched. Phrases like “unbelievable” and “batshit insane” get bandied about by critics — this one included — so regularly that they have virtually lost all meaning, the inclination to traffic…
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…
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…