CODA The title of Siân Heder’s sophomore feature is twofold: an acronym for the “child of deaf adults,” and the concluding passage or movement of a music piece. Centered around seventeen-year-old Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member in her deaf family of four, CODA mainly adopts…
Malcolm and Marie is an affecting meditation on the private life of relationships and the closed-door conflicts that arise in the absence of an audience. When film and television production came to a halt last March due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, the entertainment industry panicked. With…
Palmer has noble intentions and a winning performance from Timberlake, but it’s thematically undercooked and tonally jarring. Apple TV+’s Palmer, the latest film from actor/director Fisher Stevens, is a lot of things: a classic tale of personal redemption; a woke study of gender identity; a thoughtful plea for tolerance;…
A Note on Selection and Organization Criteria The albums in our canon were categorized according to the year and label that granted them their earliest release anywhere in the world — except in certain cases where a later release may have been deemed more “canonical” (for instance choosing to list Public Image Ltd.’s Second…
— The Film Canon — A Note on Selection and Organization Criteria The films in our canon were categorized according to the year of their U.S. theatrical release and the distributor behind it — except in cases where a.) the time between the film’s international release and its U.S. one exceeded five years, or b.)
Breaking Fast is a delicate, charming, and welcomingly chaste love story that features an old-fashioned appeal. The marketing materials for the new queer comedy Breaking Fast make the film look like the kind of salacious, low-budget filler clogging the pipelines of Amazon Prime, with its smiling, attractive male leads…
Savage State is more fetish than flesh, settling for cyphers that vaguely reflect old Western classics. Although the Western may be long past its heyday, there are still filmmakers working within the genre who are trying to redefine and revive it, through the introduction of new ideas and other…
Supernova is a restrained love story that manages to balance out the territory’s innate sentimentality. While actor-turned-director Harry Macqueen’s debut film Hinterland utilized the premise of a road trip to chronicle a fractured, intimate relationship (earning fetching reviews from critics in the process), his follow-up, Supernova, also features a…
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…
Film About a Father Who is an intimate, innovative auto-doc about wounded people finding solace in the company of fellow stragglers. Film About A Father Who is Lynne Sachs’ latest, and evidently most personal, feat of documentation. Patched together from various conversations and intimate moments inked on 16mm film,…
Preparations is a major discovery, its distinct character recalling nothing less than the works of Abbas Kiarostami, Christian Petzold, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time opens with a grand romantic gesture. After 20 years in the United States, Dr. Marta Vizy (Natasa…
Pluto x Baby Pluto is an uneven affair, less a successful collaboration than a platform for one ascending rapper to overshadow one feeling the fade. At first glance, the collaboration between Future and Lil Uzi Vert that birthed the Pluto x Baby Pluto mixtape makes a lot of logical…
Juicy J There are few constants in this precarious universe that we inhabit: the sky is blue, the grass is green, and as long as Jordan Michael Houston is still breathing, he’s going to be doing the thing he’s been doing since the early ’90s, which is turning…
Some of the most elegant and graceful tracking shots ever seen open Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor. They may be drone or helicopter-assisted; the camera, gravity-defying, soars over a remote snowy spot in the mountains of southwest Poland’s Kłodzko Valley region. In the late gloaming hours, some kind of search party,…
The Salt of Tears is a pensive film that finds the aged director again reckoning with notions of parenthood, permanence, and familial legacy. Over the course of his half-century career behind the camera, 72-year-old French master Philippe Garrel has traversed a multitude of styles. From his 1964 debut project,…
Downfalls High barely qualifies as a film and attempts little but manages to ride MGK’s guiding charisma to some playful places. If you were one of the untold number who tuned in to the Facebook Live premiere (or subsequent recording) of Machine Gun Kelly’s debut “film” Downfalls High, it’s…
When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview. Luc Besson was pumping out reliably stylized action-thrillers like La Femme Nikita and Léon. Saccharine crowd-pleasers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie were only a few…
The Ultimate Playlist of Noise abandons an interesting conceit for a far more staid one but still manages to be charming enough in spurts. Sound of Metal meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower in The Ultimate Playlist of Noise, Hulu’s new teen dramedy that chronicles a high schooler’s final weeks…
The Dig is a gorgeous effort but entirely sidelines the fascinating psychological and emotional terrain implicit to its narrative. Every niche interest deserves its own movie. By this, I don’t just mean mere on-screen representation, but rather a film or series that really interrogates the heart of the matter.…
Locked Down wants to be the film of this pandemic moment but is instead tiresomely repetitive, tonally chaotic, and already outdated. A January 6th puff piece from Variety lays out the wildly accelerated production schedule of the new Covid-19 heist-comedy Locked Down, detailing how director Doug Liman and screenwriter…