A film of casually assured artistry and superficial topicality, Noémie Merlant’s feature debut Mi Iubita, Mon Amour is something of an archetypal French festival entry, albeit one that occasionally transcends its foundational triteness. Merlant, who also stars, balances the remarkable self-possession she maintained in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of…
Despite a few bright moments, Culture III is just another Migos album with little to say. There’s an alternate timeline where Culture III never came to be, where, following the January 2018 release of Culture II, the trap trio went on to successful solo careers, Quavo Hunhco, The Last Rocket, and Father of 4 establishing each respective…
Migos There’s an alternate timeline where Culture III never came to be, where, following the January 2018 release of Culture II, the trap trio went on to successful solo careers, Quavo Hunhco, The Last Rocket, and Father of 4 establishing each respective artist as an individually formidable creative…
Each one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films is a series of echoes and recurrences, palimpsests of what has preceded and teasing forebears of what’s to follow. There are certain indicators to his career’s chronology — sly mention of current events, the obvious quality of the filmmaking tools — but…
The Holocaust has provided the backdrop for so many films that it’s a rather bracing experience to discover one that handles the subject and setting in a way that’s unique. That’s certainly the case with A Radiant Girl, the debut feature by actress Sandrine Kiberlain (Mademoiselle Chambon, Life…
Moneyboys A tacked-on melancholy shoulders, for the most part, the dramatic weight present in C.B. Yi’s carefully composed and frequently arresting first feature. Moneyboys, as its titular plurality suggests, calls into focus not just personal biography, of which its half-decade account is largely constituted, but also a broader…
The titular fracture, between Marina Foïs and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s lesbian couple Julie and Raf, is one of three divides uniting La Fracture’s anxious reality. Physically, it’s an elbow fracture that sends Raf to the hospital waiting room after an argument pushes her ten-year relationship with Julie, with whom…
Bergman Island Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally, an insular film. Set almost entirely on the island of Fårö, where the legendary Swedish filmmaker lived and shot a number of his most celebrated features, it looks at a place that has become a focal point for all…
George Romero’s two 1978 releases, Dawn of the Dead and Martin, represent the director at the apex of his career as an artist who had already grown beyond his revolutionary early work but still contained the hunger of a true independent. The two films pull Romero in opposite…
The forest greens and crumbling modernist estates of the Eastern French town of Forbach provide the backdrop for Softie (Petite Nature), a queer coming-of-age story from Party Girl director and Camera d’Or winner Samuel Theis. A father’s hands shake as his 10-year-old son, Johnny (Aliocha Reinert), expertly rolls…
Cow Depending on your perspective — and depending on the film — Andrea Arnold’s cinema vacillates between kitsch and kitchen sink, her intended brand of (dour) social realism sliding easily into fussy melodrama. Fish Tank’s over-seriousness marks one end of her spectrum, American Honey’s campier self-awareness the other,…
Though the films of John Cassavetes are often erroneously described as “improvised” or “verite,” claims that belie Cassavetes’s formal fidelity, it was a modernist, Virginia Woolf, who, in 1919, ten years before Cassavetes’ birth, described pretty well what would become something of a mantra for the filmmaker: “Let…
Rebecca Black’s latest EP once again proves that she is a legitimate pop power still being slept on. Rebecca Black transcended “Friday” years ago. Since 2017, she’s been putting out synthpop gems that shine alternately with melancholy, exuberance, and defiance, but, without fail, are polished to perfection. Her…
Modest Mouse Modest Mouse has touched heights few of their contemporaries have managed (or, necessarily bothered to pursue), the band’s career a curious journey beginning in the punk/DIY scene of the American Pacific Northwest, before meandering on into mainstream credibility and Top 40 respectability mid-career. This sudden success…
How do you get away with the perfect murder? Easy: get someone else to do it for you. Such is the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train, a taut, Dostoyevskyian exploration of moral ambiguity. Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Hitchcock weaves a…
Black Widow is fairly lightweight and doesn’t impress much with its action or visual design, but the character work and comedy prove somewhat redemptive. Although it takes place sometime between the events of Civil War and Infinity War, Black Widow begins in the mid-’90s, with Natasha Romanoff in her…
First Date endows its stock premise with a zany amateurism that is simultaneously cool and cringeworthy. First Date, the debut feature of directorial duo Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp, has a gonzo sensibility that threatens, on occasion, to undermine its claims to baseline competency. The premise, without spoiling too…
Dynasty Warriors buries its littered, low-key strengths under a deluge of CGI nonsense. What does it mean to adapt the video game series Dynasty Warriors, itself an adaptation of the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, into a movie? A simple retelling of part of Three…
Edge of the World is a weak film that further dooms itself by so liberally cribbing from better works. The name and fame of Sir James Brooke should be familiar to plenty, even if his (hi)story doesn’t immediately spring to mind. A well-known 19th-century adventurer and British officer,…
Hero Mode is almost charming in its throwback vibe, but its rhetoric is far less appealing. There’s a disappearing niche that films like Hero Mode (directed by A.J. Tesler) cater to, a crucial purpose that somewhat redeems its clumsy designs for those weaned off their appeal: retreating from…