2021 film fest season is underway, and with it comes a whole bunch of movies reckoning with last year’s lockdown and the still ongoing…
The Beta Test Over the course of now three feature films, Jim Cummings has established himself as the premier chronicler of a very contemporary,…
In 2008, the Drive-by Truckers weren’t exactly a band on the ropes — actually, they were on a winning streak that no other contemporary…
Tove disrupts standard biopic conventions and mines meaning from its language-heavy approach. In a 1946 letter to her love Vivica Bandler, Swedish writer and artist…
A favorite on the international festival circuit with a robust filmography of at least 40 films made over 50 or so years, Júlio Bressane…
Laird Cregar, a man with virtually no name recognition today, was, in his time, a popular American stage actor, one who was fast-tracked to…
Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and…
Scarecrow Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung…
In the Heights isn’t going to save the theatrical experience, but at 143 minutes, will help kill some time. In development since the musical…
Spike Lee’s 1991 Jungle Fever, a work with a title and subject matter seemingly designed to court — indeed, demand — controversy, is at…
In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and…
The playfulness of Chantal Akerman is, throughout her work, always nebulous. A smile, a laugh, a tall-standing stride: these do not signify transparent gestures,…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but…
The State I Am In, Christian Petzold’s theatrical feature debut, begins with a song. Opening on a profile shot of its central character, Jeanne…
Even before his international recognition as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold was already cultivating and mastering his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Bearing…
One of the great madcap poets of the American cinema, Alan Rudolph has seemingly slipped into irrelevance since his heyday in the 1980s and…
Deliver Us from Evil fails in both its attempts at severe drama and action spectacle, proving an equal opportunity offender in the process. If the…
Few, if any, artists in the history of modern popular music experienced a creative eruption as rich as did Miles Davis did in the…