It’s been a while since the world has been treated to a new Hal Hartley film. The writer/director’s career, which kicked off with 1989’s The Unbelievable Truth, never quite rose to the level of acclaim that was reached by contemporaries like Richard Linklater or Paul Thomas Anderson, but…
The History of Sound, from director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck, was met with a somewhat chilly critical reception at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Much-anticipated due to its buzzy stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, the film’s deliberate pacing and carefully calibrated restraint frustrated some critics.…
Sermon to the Void Amid a churning torrent of acid gold, Hilal Baydarov’s Sermon to the Void unveils its true form, slipping away from its preambulatory parable into something wholly incantatory. This displacement arrives unhurriedly; in fact, so gradual is its presence, and so glacial are its frames,…
As the Western world’s exemplar of an exotic and fantastical Orient, the city of Bangkok has fashioned itself into a locale of permissivity where sin and indulgence are self-consciously flaunted. To Western eyes, they bespeak the privilege of skin and socio-economic status; for locals, the farang types —…
Traditionally, dramas dealing with characters moving on from relationships follow a three-part structure: the chronicling of the youthful highs of the first passionate relationship and circumstances leading to its dissolution; the devastating aftershocks of that dissolution (with the former either being deployed linearly or emerging as a flashback…
If it ever gets proper distribution, Zoe Eisenberg’s new romantic drama Chaperone will surely generate several cycles of enervating discourse on Twitter; it’s rare that a film highlights a complicated character like Misha (Mitzi Akaha) without judgment or audience hand-holding. A realistic portrait of aging millennial ennui, Misha…
The Currents A woman, beautiful and a touch removed, travels to Switzerland from Argentina to accept an award. She throws the glass statuette in the bathroom trash, then leaves the ceremony to wander the streets. Clad in a vivid blue coat, she stands out from the grey cobblestone…
Wavelengths 2: Into the Blue, more than either of the other 2025 shorts programs or the features, exemplifies experimental film programming’s recent trend toward documentary, essay, and other “non-fiction” forms. All of the films in this program explore, in some fashion, the moving image as archive, memory, or…
Mile End Kicks Having decided myself to migrate from a Toronto suburb to Montreal in my young adulthood shortly after hearing Visions for the first time, I am perhaps a few inches short of the requisite “critical distance” to pen a sober review of Chandler Levack’s Mile End…
Having decided myself to migrate from a Toronto suburb to Montreal in my young adulthood shortly after hearing Visions for the first time, I am perhaps a few inches short of the requisite “critical distance” to pen a sober review of Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks. My notes…
Siyou Tan’s debut feature, Amoeba, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival under its Discovery section, introducing a fresh and candid new voice in Singaporean cinema. Billed as a coming-of-age film, Amoeba raises a defiant finger to the institutions and ideologies of control that have, since time immemorial,…
A Streetcar Named Desire is so iconic within cinema history that the film itself can easily be taken for granted. One could boil down its legacy, all too simply, to its ushering of Marlon Brando into movie stardom — bringing with him Method Acting and new models of…
The name Duplass has become so synonymous with indie filmmaking, and Jay’s fingers (along with brother Mark) have found themselves in so many different pots, that it’s easy to forget that his last movie as director was 2012’s The Do-Deca-Pentathlon. It’s more surprising that a Duplass movie hasn’t…
Much was made after the premiere of James Sweeney’s second feature, Twinless, of a steamy sex scene between his and Dylan O’Brien’s characters. Fans of the former Teen Wolf star took advantage of the film’s (short-lived) online availability to rip the scene and post it widely, giddy that…
What’s the worst thing that can come from a threesome? The storied history of cinematic threesomes and group sex rarely end well. Most often, relationships disintegrate and sexual fantasies lose their enchantment. The disappointment most often centers on the sex itself: awkwardness, unexpected jealousy, an uneven distribution of…
It’s nothing less than a miracle that restorations of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ criminally underseen Tras-os-Montes, Ana, and Rosa de Areia are making their way around the world. That João César Monteiro has an upcoming full career retrospective is manna falling from heaven. These are films that,…
Bing Liu ascribed a refreshingly unsentimental energy to the coming-of-age genre in his Oscar-nominated documentary, Minding the Gap. For his debut narrative feature, Preparation for the Next Life, Liu has adopted a similar philosophy, combining a cinematic eye with a ruthless approach to character building that is unafraid…
Opening on a failed suicide attempt, you’d never expect to dovetail into a charming and winding meet-cute over the course of a Christmas Eve. Yet that’s exactly what the Jay Duplass-directed The Baltimorons does in this utterly lovely holiday romcom. Cliff (Michael Strassner), fresh from attempting suicide, cracks…
The August dog days of cinema’s summer season are typically filled with second-rate tentpoles and mid-sized studio fare designed to capitalize on undiscerning audiences looking for some old-fashioned theater-going comfort before summer ends, school resumes, etc. And indeed, there were second-rate tentpoles (The Naked Gun, surprisingly good!) and…
A House of Dynamite For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how so few contemporary filmmakers dare to grapple with one of the key issues of our times — almost as if narratives on mutually…
Filmmaker Julian Schnabel returns to a familiar topic with his In the Hand of Dante… sort of. The painter-turned-acclaimed filmmaker has dedicated most of his career to dramatizing the personal demons and trials of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Reinaldo Arenas, and Vincent van Gogh — and depending on…