Once Upon a River is frequently pretty to look at, but Rose fails to build much depth into the film’s fable-like narrative. Once Upon a River is another entry in a developing sub-genre of post-Twain bildungsroman cinema, combining elements of fable with aw-shucks rootedness in the natural world. Its…
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…
Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca remake is an emotionally facile film devoid of either atmosphere or ambiguity. It’s easy to criticize any literary adaptation simply for straying from the text. Fealty to source material means a lot for fans of any book and it’s frequently the benchmark by which cinematic versions…
Rose: A Love Story is yet another example of art-house horror that plays coy with its genre elements. It’s the kind of film that wants to be more than just horror, but winds up ladling on heavy-handed symbolism and doom-laden portent instead of being scary. Directed by Jennifer…
Ammonite Three years on from Francis Lee’s terrific gay drama, God’s Own Country, and the director has moved on from the romantic union of two lusty male farmers to a 19th-century entanglement between a female paleontologist and an unhappy wife. Away from the rural wilds of Northern England…
Following a trio of failed marriages, Jane Fonda famously later observed that the point at which she knew they were over was when she began to fantasize about her husbands’ deaths. Natalia Meta’s intrigue-filled The Intruder, having made its mark at this year’s Venice Film Festival, certainly has…
Herself A patron of the British arts, Phyllida Lloyd’s transition from a director of theater to film could hardly have been more conspicuous. Her debut feature, Mamma Mia, set box-office records, while her follow-up, The Iron Lady (2011), went on to win two Oscars — including a long-awaited…
The Forty-Year-Old Version deploys a charming lead but never manages to coalesce its many and varied influences. Within the relative glut of 21st-century hip hop cinema, The Forty-Year-Old Version is a curious fit. Unlike so many other such films, it’s not a biopic, and while it shares the autofictive…
Lovers Rock Steve McQueen has always been a fine purveyor of potentially rich and powerful narratives, but he’s been much less consistent as their steward. His first three features (Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave) all focused on singular individuals locked in combat with dominant cultural norms or…
Falling The prospect of spending a couple hours with one of the most tremendously unpleasant movie characters you’re likely to ever encounter might not even be the first reason to check out of Viggo Mortensen’s Falling, but it’s certainly the most apparent. This clearly personal story, written and…
Think Spotlight but shot by Yu Lik-wai, Jia Zhang-ke’s favorite DP. Sounds pretty neat, right? And for a while, The Best Is Yet to Come is an involving, topical newsroom drama: Wang Jing zips through the early, procedural-minded portion of his feature directorial debut, meshing the documentary influences…
The Best Is Yet to Come Think Spotlight but shot by Yu Lik-wai, Jia Zhang-ke’s favorite DP. Sounds pretty neat, right? And for a while, The Best Is Yet to Come is an involving, topical newsroom drama: Wang Jing zips through the early, procedural-minded portion of his feature directorial…
Miyamoto hopes to manifest the power of a pendulum hanging over one’s head — swaying, seeking a point of equilibrium. That pendulum is morality: At the core of director Tetsuya Mariko’s adaptation (there’s already been a Miyamoto manga and TV series) is a rape, but from this act arises…
Pieces of a Woman Director Kornél Mundruczó knows how to open a film (see the otherwise underwhelming White God, for example), and with Pieces of a Woman he sets out to obliterate his previous benchmark. After quick, separate introductions to Shawn (Shia LaBeouf) and Martha (Vanessa Kirby), a…
Soul Emir Ezwan’s debut feature, Soul, is part of an emerging Malaysian cinema heavily composed of genre fare. Made for roughly $80,000 USD, the horror film is clearly a labor of love and, on the strength of its slick jungle compositions and dark, dynamic vistas, would seem to…
Night of the Kings 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 and One Nights, and utilising a Scheherazade-like figure as its…
It’s unclear if the new film Gone with the Light is directly inspired by or otherwise wholesale lifting the premise of The Leftovers (both the HBO television show and the Tom Perrotta novel of the same name). Whatever the genesis of the film, after similar inciting incidents, it…
Nomadland Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip assessment of a film that takes to the fringes of American life: Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction work of the same name, the film…
Legally Declared Dead Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and played every kind of character in his nearly forty-year career. At first blush, the new film Legally Declared Dead looks like a throwback to…
There never was a romance quite like it: beat poets/star-crossed lovers Exene Cervenka and John Doe form a little rock band with guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D. J. Bonebrake — a list of names straight out of a Charles Bukowski novel — then get married, hit it…