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…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of…
Werewolves Within doesn’t deliver many scares, but it hits an amusing, breezy target that too few horror-comedies manage. Finn (Sam Richardson) is the new forest ranger in the little town of Beaverfield, which, as friendly (and gossipy) mail carrier Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) tells him, is fraying a little…
Weezer’s latest record is pure escapism, a pop synthesis of stray sonic elements that reaffirms River’s place as the reigning rock romantic. It’s almost unfathomable to believe, but Weezer has continued to sustain themselves as a cultural entity for almost three decades since the release of their debut…
Olivia Rodrigo The cultural phenomenon that is Olivia Rodrigo, beyond whatever fanbase she amassed while a Disney channel star, can be best interpreted as follows: Most members of the elite media class have never really gotten over their high-school years and are therefore willing to bend over backwards…
Fathom In the wake of Planet Earth’s zeitgeist arrival in 2006 and DisneyNature’s subsequent founding a short two years later, the nature documentary — and, increasingly, docu-series — has become ubiquitous, with virtually every major streaming platform doling out a handful of (often aesthetically anonymous) offerings each year.…
St. Vincent’s attempt at a classic rock recalibration is more tone-deaf than innovative. The teaser trailer that dropped on March 2 showed a collection of wavering handheld shots, depicting a harried Annie Clark in a blond wig and trench coat running the green-tinted halls of an aged Manhattan…
St. Vincent The teaser trailer that dropped on March 2 showed a collection of wavering handheld shots, depicting a harried Annie Clark in a blond wig and trench coat running the green-tinted halls of an aged Manhattan apartment building, frantically searching for a ringing phone. Upon locating and…
Get Out gets the alien abduction treatment in No Running, a half-hearted stab at social commentary that isn’t nearly as fun or as clever as that premise might suggest. Director Delmar Washington and writer Tucker Morgan have crafted a sci-fi tale that strains for topicality but can’t even…
Dating & New York Dating & 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 window dressing here immediately recalls Wes Anderson: the film opens with (and sustains) a…
The Birthday Cake doesn’t offer anything original, but its small-scale mob stylings will likely please a certain moviegoing demographic. If the Internet is to be believed, Jimmy Giannopoulos is a drummer and music producer who formed the American R&B and electropop duo LOLAWOLF with actress and singer Zoë Kravitz…