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…
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…
Jolt is an ironically-titled dud, its rote thriller stylings utterly unervating. Tanya Wexler’s Jolt is like a fake movie playing on the television in a better, but probably still mediocre movie. It’s a cheap but slick product, nothing but a piece of content used to pad Amazon’s release schedule…
The Last Letter from Your Lover is an utter misfire, devoid of the chemistry and coherent performances necessary to sell its ostensible romance. Like so many films before it, the romantic drama The Last Letter from Your Lover is based on a best-selling novel. The title alone is like…
Settlers offers neither genre thrills nor any real interrogation of the material’s potentially rich subtext. Part sci-fi thriller, part western, part survivalist drama, Wyatt Rockefeller’s Settlers has a lot of familiar genre antecedents, but not much of a clue of what to do with them. In other words, its…
Deception A long pursued passion project, Arnaud Desplechin’s latest picture adapts Philip Roth’s 1990 slippery, erotic novel, Deception, into cinematic form for the first time. The late Jewish-American writer’s work has defined the contemporary U.S. literature canon extensively, and yet, few have really figured how to translate him…
Onoda, 10,000 Nights in the Jungle Every pronouncement that points to a Second Coming ruptures the human sense of linear temporal experience, pulling one out of the unending succession of days epitomized by Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. In the Pacific War in the Philippines, the…
In Front of Your Face The films of Hong Sang-soo, ever so magical yet construed from the affairs of quotidian encounters, every minimal gesture compounding a maximal observation, have over the past two decades established through their associative textures a cinematic canon of sorts; a canon whose shared…
From Nouvelle Vague filmmakers like Jacques Demy, Jacques Rivette, and Alain Resnais to a contemporary auteur such as Bruno Dumont, or even the more mainstream-friendly work of Christophe Honoré, French cinema has never been a stranger to the musical. In fact, most of these filmmakers, according to their…
France Bruno Dumont’s monumentally titled France takes the director’s search for spiritual transcendence amidst everyday violence into a new zone of satiric melodrama. Having taken a sledgehammer to one of the key national myths in his Jeannette/Jeanne diptych, including an iconoclastic takedown of Dreyer (cinema’s saint, surely), where…