Together In Michael Shanks’ body-horror-comedy Together, the recently-engaged but longtime-dating couple of Millie and Tim (played by real-life spouses and frequent creative collaborators Alison Brie and Dave Franco) find themselves stranded in a mysterious, underground chamber after being caught in the rain while hiking in the woods. The…
Attention: this one’s for all the Obayashi heads out there. Daigo Matsui’s Rewrite begins in a place we know well: a high school girl named Miyuki learns that the new transfer student (Yasuhiko) is actually a time traveler from 300 years into the future. The two of them,…
A young man named Ibuki (played by multi-hyphenate star Raul), styled as a “bad boy” because of, presumably, his dyed-blonde hair and dangling earrings, is recruited by the mysterious head of a Japanese CIA-like organization to protect his high school-aged daughter Honeko (model-turned actress Natsuki Deguchi), who has…
After arguably seeing his fame peak in the early days of Covid — on the back of starring turns in Big Time Adolescence and The King of Staten Island, a short-lived but tabloid-saturating romance with Ariana Grande, and the rise of his perennial bromance-of-the-year relationship with Machine Gun…
What remains of the video store today is a boutique novelty. Unless you happen to live in a neighborhood hip enough to indulge in cinephilic nostalgia (but not hip enough to drive rents outside the means of Roger Corman DVD rentals), video stores are an artifact of memory,…
Back in the winter, the film Companion used the premise of a young “couple” taking their first trip together to a secluded house in the countryside as a springboard for a dystopian take on the battle of the sexes. Now, in a bit of synchronicity, that premise is revisited some…
Copper In director Nicolás Pereda’s Copper, Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Rodríguez) discovers a corpse by the side of the road. It’s unusual enough for him to mention this to his mother Tere (Teresita Sánchez) and his aunt Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez — these eponymous characters also a Pereda…
Filmmakers working under the constraints of an oppressive regime must become very good at leaving things unsaid. The main ideas are often relegated to the subtext, on the assumption (or at least the hope) that sensitive viewers will be able to read between the lines and, more importantly,…
Assaf Gruber’s Miraculous Accident provides us with what we might wish to distinguish as one of the first contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist fiction projects. With this, it must be determined that this is not a work speaking explicitly against the Palestinian genocide, but a project whose imagination of Jewish…
“He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.” — Ecclesiastes 10:8 They called him Von, the man in whom lived so many. Von Schnieditz, von Bickel, von Eberhard, von Steuben, von Hohenegg, von Wildeliebe-Rauffenburg, von Furst, von Traunsee, von Rauffenstein, von Harden, von Maylerling, von Stroheim. The many…
Drifting Laurent The world of Drifting Laurent, the sophomore feature by directors Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture, and Mattéo Eustachon, is not too dissimilar from that of Alain Guiardie’s Misericordia from earlier this year. Both films contemplate the nebulous desires of a sexually fluid drifter who turns up in…
The world of Drifting Laurent, the sophomore feature by directors Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture, and Mattéo Eustachon, is not too dissimilar from that of Alain Guiardie’s Misericordia from earlier this year. Both films contemplate the nebulous desires of a sexually fluid drifter who turns up in a small,…
It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for new directors, the Competition most often reserved for well-established auteurs. Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond is one of the handful of first features to…
Serpent’s Path Kiyoshi Kurosawa is our great purveyor of modern ennui, a chronicler of creeping existential dread as the world we have created now threatens to engulf us at every turn. Justly famous for horror films like Cure and Pulse, Kiyoshi has also wrung eerie, ominous vibes out…
Chop wood, carry water. The well is running dry for the titular noise punk band of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz. Their shows in their hometown of Tokyo are yielding crowds of twos, poor sales of their latest album have landed them $20,000 in debt with their label, and…
Imbued with plenty of allure and the potential for surprise, friendly get-togethers and familial gatherings in cinema sustain such an appeal that they never outright feel dusty or outmoded, and, on the contrary, still hold a special place for many contemporary indie dramedies. Despite financial practicalities that often…
Girls is Lena Dunham’s magnum opus. The irony is that she wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the HBO classic at the ripe age of 24. Since the show ended in 2017, Dunham has acted in films like Treasure (2024) and directed films like the sexually-realized Sharp Stick…
30 minutes into Jem Cohen’s new film Little, Big, and Far, the viewer watches a mostly vacant mall parking lot slowly descend into darkness. For most of this remarkable sequence, we don’t see the eclipse taking place, just the effect, its look akin to the then-imperfect, day-for-night aesthetic…
Come a little closer and see — you need to inhale. No contemporary filmmaker understands California quite like Paul Thomas Anderson, who throughout his rightfully vaunted career (save for, in this writer’s opinion, the wild misfire Licorice Pizza) has rendered it the perfect microcosm for all that is…
There are two popular theories about the etymology of Prvić, a Croatian island in the Šibenik archipelago. The first theory relates to its closest proximity to the mainland in the archipelago: “prvi” means “first” in Serbo-Croatian. The second, and much more fun, theory relates to a name for…