Collective is a compelling portrait of bureaucratic inertia and stasis and a rich study in the difficulties of actual progress. On October 30, 2015, a fire broke out in the Colectiv concert club in Bucharest, killing 27 on site. In the following months, another 37 would die in Romanian…
Freaky is a playful and genuinely funny ’90s slasher revamp that boasts both surprising commentary and appropriately gnarly kill thrills. There’s a lot to like about director Christopher Landon’s latest feature, Freaky, in which a bullied high schooler named Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) swaps bodies with a sadistic serial…
Woody Allen’s long-delayed latest isn’t among the director’s most psychologically incisive works, but its minor-key efforts reflect a curious transposition of the director’s old-fashioned absorptions onto a modern metropolitan setting. Make no mistake — Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York is far from the auteur’s best…
Ammonite struggles to summon the visceral potency or emotional depth needed to tell its story. 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…
As with any Herzog effort, there are pleasures to be found in Fireball, but the end result still offers decisively diminishing returns for the prolific director. There was a time when the release of a new Werner Herzog film, whether a new oddball fiction effort or a probing documentary,…
Jungleland is a deeply familiar film that injects little energy or originality into its template narrative. Max Winkler’s Jungleland follows bare-knuckle boxer Lion (Jack O’Connell) and his manager-brother (Charlie Hunnam) as they make their way across America towards a potentially life-changing fight in San Francisco. Joining them is a…
Lana’s latest might be branded as spoken-word poetry, but Violet still features the introspective lyricism, emotional vulnerability, and intelligent songcraft we’ve come to expect from the singular artist. The prospect of a book of poetry from Lana Del Rey might seem, to anyone familiar with the songs that made her…
Ellie Goulding’s latest sees her transition from pure chart persona to an assured pop artist. In the five years since her last album, the excellent Delirium, Ellie Goulding’s position in the pop music stratosphere has remained anomalous and nebulous. The album’s biggest hit, “Love Me Like You Do,”…
Lana Del Rey The prospect of a book of poetry from Lana Del Rey might seem, to anyone familiar with the songs that made her famous and her accompanying image, like a rupture in the delicate fabric of her chic Americana branding, taking her frequent references to the…
Fire Will Come retains a kind of documentary-based fascination even as it becomes clear capturing the titular blaze was the only real objective here. Oliver Laxe‘s Fire Will Come is a film built upon two contrasting modes. On one hand, there’s its ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere, seen most clearly in…
Spontaneous tries to be too many things at once, and ultimately doesn’t scratch the surface of any of them. Spontaneous is a lot of things: sci-fi, horror, romance, tragedy, coming-of-age. The one thing it fails to be, however, is compelling; writer-director Brian Duffield is unable to find not…
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…