Raging Fire When credits roll on Raging Fire they are accompanied by behind-the-scenes footage of Benny Chan at work directing the film. It’s a warm tribute to the late director, who died of cancer shortly after filming this, his last movie. That he was gone before post-production began…
Ema is Larrain’s best film yet, a technical marvel and narrative step forward that hopefully anticipates the tenor of his next stretch of work. It hasn’t always been quite clear what Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín has been working toward, nor where he might steer his career next, first getting…
An astounding six years went into the making of Frank and Zed, writer-director Jesse Blanchard’s magnum opus of friendship and bloodshed. But this is no ordinary feature film, as Blanchard employs an all-puppet cast in telling his tale; the sets have all been meticulously crafted by hand, while…
Junk Head A stop-motion animated epic over seven years in the making, Junk Head is the work of one obsessively dedicated man, Takahide Hori. An interior decorator by trade, Hori embarked on his passion project with no formal filmmaking training, inspired by the homemade computer animations of Makoto…
Annette is somehow both Carax’s weirdest and safest film, a letdown even as its vision remains bold. One-time enfant terrible Leos Carax, foremost contemporary purveyor of l’amour fou, the missing link between the nouvelle vague and the cinema du look, fervent admirer of Stallone’s Paradise Alley, and creator…
On the strength of Gunn’s outré humor and filmmaking sensibilities, The Suicide Squad is nothing less than the most enjoyable comic book flick in a quick minute. With David Ayer’s 2016 Suicide Squad being roundly considered an abject failure (despite heavy studio meddling) and the so-called DC cinematic universe…
Tsai’s latest, like the director’s best works, revels in the unexpected, sublime textures of daily routine and understated tenderness. Those familiar with Tawainese auteur Tsai Ming-liang will know what to expect from his latest feature, Days, which won the Teddy Award at the 2020 Berlinale. With his trademark slow-burn style, Tsai…
All Hands on Deck dabble in tropes and archetypes, but still manages a vibrancy that keeps the film afloat. One of a number of Rohmer riffs making the festival rounds currently, All Hands on Deck (originally titled À l’abordage!) is also the latest film from Guillaume Brac, a director whose work just…
In recalibrating its source material, The Green Knight often proves compelling, but it doesn’t always convince as a fully liberated work. “I see legends,” Gawain (Dev Patel) is prompted to say as he observes the commencement of King Arthur’s Christmas banquet. Too obviously, he wants to join them. David…
Jungle Cruise’s attempts at throwback family adventuring are lost to a miasma of awful VFX and greenscreen compositing. For some reason, Disney’s Jungle Cruise, a $200 million family-oriented studio blockbuster based on a children’s amusement park ride, begins with the opening strains of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.” Riddle…
Delmer Daves has his deserved champions, but even so, he’s an interesting sell; not a hard one, per se, but one that’s mildly inundated with caveats and hesitant admissions. Kent Jones aptly touted Daves’ directorial penchant for goodness, benevolence of all kinds, which implies a risk of saccharine…
The winner of FIDMarseille International Competition, as well as the recipient of its Best Actress award in that category, Haruhara San’s Recorder proves an appropriate choice for the festival’s (basically) top prize, speaking to this year’s apparent curatorial themes and adhering to a pace not dissimilar to that…
Haruhara San’s Recorder The winner of FIDMarseille International Competition, as well as the recipient of its Best Actress award in that category, Haruhara San’s Recorder proves an appropriate choice for the festival’s (basically) top prize, speaking to this year’s apparent curatorial themes and adhering to a pace not…
Now just a couple years away from 80, Tulsa’s own scumbag auteur Larry Clark is still making movies about teens having sex and doing drugs, with concerning zeal. His recent years have been taken up by the ambitious Marfa Girl trilogy, a pretty nasty, maybe magnum opus, that’s…
Outside Noise Ted Fendt’s body of work is at least in part characterized by its very purposeful progression. His films are all dryly comedic character studies of some sort or another; his earliest works were short comedic sketches akin to those of Éric Rohmer and Luc Moullet, though…
Hal Hartley occupies a curious position in the American film scene. While he might reasonably be called an icon of the independent film scene and has remained a fixture of prestigious film festivals like Sundance and Cannes since the late 1980s, he has never had the true breakout…
Can You Bring It is a sumptuous, intelligent work about the beauty and infinity of the creative process. Following the evolution of the titular groundbreaking dance piece, D-Man in the Waters, in the three decades since its release, Can You Bring It weaves together three iterations of the…
The Man with the Answers aims for restraint but instead fails to either properly probe or articulate its characters. A well-meaning and tentative entrant into the realm of slow-burn road trip romances, Stelios Kammitsis’ The Man with the Answers is perhaps most noteworthy for telling the story of…
Long Story Short is occasionally pretty to look at but otherwise gruelingly repetitive and dull. From the guy that played Kano in this year’s Mortal Kombat reboot comes Long Story Short, an Australian romantic comedy that basically takes the third act of Adam Sandler’s Click and stretches it…
Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the many mash-ups of the two proliferating under the dreaded confines of pandemic filmgoing (hunkered down, for most, with oneself or one’s significant other to…