Petite Maman Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed on a precipice of some essential awareness, riding the ebbs and flows of emerging self-knowledge, and arriving at necessarily unsettled places. Specifically, her films explore that bardo between childhood and adulthood — often, but not always tethered to sexual awakening…
In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori — whose existence in Byron’s mansion resembled something more like an in-house drug dealer than a typical country doctor — wrote ghost stories and…
Bloodsuckers In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori — whose existence in Byron’s mansion resembled something more like an in-house drug dealer than a typical country doctor — wrote ghost stories…
There are certain iconic questions in cinema history that have endured long after the credits roll. Who shot first, Han or Greedo? Did the spinning top ever fall at the end of Inception? In 1989, director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron introduced their own query to the…
Social Hygiene Retreating from the weight of actions into the weightlessness of words, Denis Côté’s latest finds a rambunctious solace in the oratorial. Serving possibly as a stylistic antithesis to 2019’s dialogue-free Wilcox (centered around the life of a drifter), the opportunely-titled Social Hygiene recalls, instead, a linguistic…
Less a feature debut than a marked progression in a career of interdisciplinary video work, Prapat Jiwarangsan’s Ploy makes no attempts to distance itself from its creator’s tenure as an installation artist, even if it is in possession of an overarching narrative, and runs a comparatively hefty 51…
Nous Cutting across Paris from the north to the south, the RER B is a commuter rail that shuttles passengers to and from the city center, moving between the northern Mitry-Mory commune and the southern Saint-Rémy-de-Provence commune. It is also the axis that Alice Diop’s documentary Nous moves…
A straightforward romantic drama that gradually reveals itself to be about something else entirely, Copilot is a modest success for about half of its runtime. Utilizing a mostly handheld camera and an uninflected approach to realism, Anne Zohra Berrached’s film follows the fits and starts of a young…
The Girl and the Spider Like their previous collaboration, 2013’s The Strange Little Cat, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider is best approached as a Rube-Goldberg contraption of physical/emotional pressure build-ups and releases. But whereas that film was set almost entirely in a Berlin apartment…
It seems nearly impossible that there’s anyone in the world who isn’t familiar with Tom and Jerry — or, at least, doesn’t recognize them. In fact, the beloved cartoon cat and mouse may be the most famous slapstick act this side of Laurel & Hardy, and their only…
Always and Forever is stretched a little thin and relies on too much filler, but remains a charming teenage rom-com and gracefully ends the trilogy. In some ways, the romantic comedy is the hardest film to resist — while they’re perhaps hit-or-miss at a higher rate than films in…
Night of the Kings thrives on both its powerful sense of artifice and brutal reality. Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature, whose structural integrity depends upon a viewer’s willingness to accept its dramatic reflexivity. A mythopoetic work invoking the oral tradition of One Thousand…
A whopping 13 features deep into their cinematic partnership, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were reaching a new apex of open acrimony in their relationship when they worked under the direction of Frank Tashlin on 1955’s Artists and Models, their penultimate film as a duo act. A miraculous…
The Future Bites is a post-apocalyptic dance party, one that grooves upon both our failures and our path to progress. Steven Wilson has been known to fans and critics alike as “The Prog Rock King.” But for the last decade, the British singer/songwriter/virtuoso’s output has been quite a bit…
Buck Meek paints an emotionally potent self-portrait on the introspective Two Saviors. Buck Meek follows up his 2018 self-titled solo release and a considerably busy Big Thief schedule with Two Saviors, a jangly, twangy sophomore interlude to the band’s ongoing, prolific discography. Recorded in a single take in…
Lucero Lucero has always found themselves at intersections; sonically, the southern rockers have incorporated, and reconstituted, elements of alt-country, punk rock, cinematic soul, and bluesy folk, which their albums reflect. A typical Lucero set peppers in a few slowed-down, stripped-bare ballad-esque tracks amidst more generally rollicking rock fare,…
Body Brokers is littered with fascinating parts, but never manages to pull it all together into a cohesive vision. There are at least four different movies vying for attention in the new ripped-from-the-headlines thriller Body Brokers, each of them potentially compelling on their own, but here awkwardly meshed together…
The World to Come is a narratively austere but emotionally and sociologically potent study of women and love under patriarchy. Set on the frigid expanse of the mid-nineteenth century amid material poverty and emotional scarcity, The World to Come finds, in its title, a feeling of spiritual profundity tempered…
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…
JUMBO manages to imbue its tricky material with sensitivity but at the expensive of teasing out much of its considerable potential. It’s not often that object sexuality (or, OS for the sake of brevity) is discussed outside the confines of lurid reality television, and as such, Zoé Wittock’s debut…
Episode Description: This week, Summer Blockbuster!?! celebrates Valentine’s Day by taking on one of the least romantic romances ever filmed: 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon, directed by Prince. The pop icon followed up his smash hit Purple Rain with a black-and-white homage to screwball comedies that plays like…