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…

The final Fear Street entry is something of a mixed bag, thriving in its eponymous past setting but floundering a bit as the series comes to a conclusion. Throughout the first two installments of Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street trilogy, the people of Shadyside have been terrorized by the…

In Hong Kong’s tropical humidity, where sweltering bodies cram around mahjong tables or hunch over noodle stands, how can two people in a forbidden romance possibly cope? For Shanghainese émigrés and next-door neighbors Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung, in a role that won him Best Actor at Cannes) and…

One of the more consistently interesting young(ish) actors working in international cinema, Louis Garrel has also spent the last decade working at a less interesting directing career which, so far, has mostly resulted in films indistinguishable from his father’s contemporary pictures (2015’s Les Deux Amis the most egregious…

The Tsugua Diaries The Tsugua Diaries would be considered quite the swing for most any other director, but for Miguel Gomes, here partnered with documentarian and collaborator Maureen Fazendeiro, it’s a relatively low-key effort, a “romp” even for a director whose last outing was a massive, three-part adaptation…

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…