The Rescue Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a knack for humanizing the most extreme situations and conditions on Earth. 2015’s Meru documented Chin’s attempt to climb the eponymous Himalayan peak, while the Oscar-winning Free Solo documented their friend Alex Honnold as he prepared to scale the…
After the resounding triumph of On Body and Soul, a film whose stoic tenderness and tactile intimacy proved an outlier among recent Golden Bear winners, Ildikó Enyedi returns to the director’s mantle with her long-anticipated adaptation of Milán Füst’s wartime novel, which tells the tale of one Captain Jakob Störr, a…
The Guilty Antoine Fuqua has made a career out of directing populist, middlebrow fare that seeks nothing more than to entertain audiences for a few hours with slick, soulless thrills. It’s not that Fuqua is necessarily a bad filmmaker, but he’s the epitome of a competent director, which…
At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, Sébastien Pilote’s traditional treatment of Louis Hemon’s Maria Chapdelaine is a headline for all the typical faults of Quebecois cinema: gratuitous, dispassionate, reverent, and very well-made. Adapting a settler narrative from the turn of the 20th century, Pilote…
Titane What is the role of “transgressive” art in an ostensibly liberal society? Or, to put it another way: In a cultural context where the top prize of the world’s most prestigious film festival can go to a movie where a woman fucks a car — twice —…
To make an effective political film, one frequently turns to documentary as the best medium for truth; it’s hard to deny in exemplars of the genre that empirical rigor and emotional realism often prevail over shoddier, more selective depictions of subject matter. But documentary hardly exerts a monopoly…
Reflection 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 festivals and became his first film to receive some kind of wider distribution. Atlantis detailed a hypothetical, near-future Ukraine that had…
Wife of a Spy can be too reserved in stretches, but is ultimately fully invigorated by its monumental conclusion. Though over three decades into his varied, distinctive career, American critics have only really paid Kiyoshi Kurosawa intermittent attention, almost exclusively recognizing him for his contributions to J-horror, with…
One of the central tensions in cinema is that of authenticity: The inherent power of this medium comes from its depiction of images and experiences drastically foreign to the viewer, even foreign to our reality. But there’s also an impulse towards depicting reality, the expectation that art should…
The Card Counter takes a similar shape to many of Schrader’s Lonely Man films, but this latest can’t quite overcome the template and thrive on its own merits. Oscar Isaac is William Tell (a self-applied pseudonym), former soldier, and ex-con. He patrols the country scoring modest winnings at…
TMBMZM oddly tilts toward authenticity rather than camp, to disappointing results. The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is a title that promises a lot. For the record, the titular brothers have nothing to do with notorious serial killer, but are instead a pair of middle-aged amateur wrestlers —…
Striding Into the Wind One of the central tensions in cinema is that of authenticity: The inherent power of this medium comes from its depiction of images and experiences drastically foreign to the viewer, even foreign to our reality. But there’s also an impulse towards depicting reality, the…
Fucking with Nobody is a radical, playful bit of meta-comedy that executes its risky conceit with aplomb. For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is a filmmaker who, after losing a project to her nemesis Kristian,…
Dating abd New York offers sporadic pleasures, but can’t shake loose its obvious cribbing of familiar cinematic influences. Dating and New York, Jonah Feingold’s feature debut after working in shorts and television for the past decade, is a film built from the scraps of its evident influences. The…
Language Lessons never quite becomes more than an acting exercise, but it’s still offers up intriguing questions about the disparity between online and offline personae. Among the many effects of the Covid-19 pandemic is how it has radically transformed every aspect of cinema, including the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of its…
To put Maurice Pialat’s 1980 masterpiece Loulou into words is a deceptively challenging task. The premise seems simple: restless Parisian woman Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) is trapped in a dull but financially stable relationship with her boss, the volatile and insecure Andre (Guy Marchand), and finds an exciting escape…
Who You Think I Am attempts to speak to our current Internet age, but mines only shallowly with its picked-over storytelling mode. Juliette Binoche, for nearly her entire career, has juggled a specific experiment in actorly debasement and a more conventional luminescence that clinches her top-billing in otherwise forgettable,…
Superhost isn’t heavy on style and runs out of steam too early, but Gracie Gillam’s outlandishly unhinged performance keep things from becoming bland rehash. A companion piece of sorts to last year’s Airbnb slasher-riff The Rental, Brandon Christensen’s Superhost tills familiar anxieties about trusting strangers while navigating a particular kind of…
Yellow Cat is the kind of cribbing-as-mode film that illuminates nothing other than the kinds of movies its director likes. Godard once declared that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun. With Yellow Cat, Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has taken that maxim to…
Sinkhole Nearly a decade after his previous feature, the 2012 big-budget disaster movie tentpole The Tower — South Korea’s very belated answer to The Towering Inferno — director Kim Ji-hoon returns to the apartment-building-in-extreme-peril genre with Sinkhole, a goofy and super-dumb yet undeniably entertaining commercial product. No prizes…