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…
How do you solve a problem like Superman? This legendary IP has been sitting either unused or abused for the better part of 20 years, subject to nostalgia and/or studio anxiety, ultimately unable to be the cornerstone of a DC Comics copycat cinematic universe to the MCU despite endless…
There probably isn’t a company on earth better associated with immediacy than Amazon. Unless one lives in the remotest regions of Canada or Alaska, there isn’t a place in North America where Amazon isn’t part of one’s daily life in some way or another. Almost any package one…
Despite having only arrived five years ago, 2020 feels in a lot of ways as if it were a century from another era, wherein a global pandemic wreaked havoc on the human race and irrevocably altered the world, never mind the entertainment industry. The temporary shuttering of movie…
Following Pacifiction, his seventh and most technically elaborate narrative film, Albert Serra did something unexpected: he produced his first full-length documentary. Afternoons of Solitude is a clear-eyed but expressionistic examination of Spanish bullfighting, focused on top-rated matador Andrés Roca Rey. We observe the torero preparing and then executing…
Eva Victor wants you to know that the cat is okay. “I feel like we should have put out a PSA!” they tell me at a recent festival screening. Victor, the writer, director, and star of their debut movie, Sorry, Baby, is referring to a moment in the…
For a film set on the Iberian Peninsula, it’s no surprise that the title Hot Milk raises some questions. Adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut follows Sofia (Emma Mackey) and Rose (Fiona Shaw), who have travelled from London to admit Rose…
As a Latinx intersex sex worker, Ponyboi (River Gallo) is well-versed in the indignity of precarity: a simple exchange with a pharmacist, for instance, involves a careful negotiation between proving his existence and being resigned to the casual cruelty of strangers. So begins Esteban Arango’s Ponyboi, a film…
Dale Dickey is a beloved veteran character actor, having enjoyed a career that spans over 30 years of consistent, quality work. Typically inhabiting the souls of individuals who grew up and/or live rough, Dickey is always sure to make her presence known, turning out memorable performances in every…
Socrates: The main question I want to ask is whether a lifetime spent scratching, itching and scratching, no end of scratching, is also a life of happiness. In The Book of Master Zhuang, an old Daoist text, is nested the Story of Butcher Ding. In this story we…
It’s girthy, oversized, gold-encrusted, evocative of pain more than pleasure. No, I’m not talking about the massive enameled penis that makes a couple appearances throughout Caligula: The Ultimate Cut; I’m referring to The Ultimate Cut itself. This newer version of the maligned 1980 film has been reconstructed entirely…
The popular conception of sexuality in America has doubtless expanded since the turn of the century, but its depiction on mainstream screens somehow has not. How many great queer dramas have we had since the year 2000? Carol, Moonlight, and Milk, certainly. A Quiet Passion and Pariah, too,…
It wasn’t his debut or even his first major work, but Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s opening credits to Tropical Malady deliver perhaps the moment that summarizes everything he’s made: a seductive flirtation with the camera, complete with protagonist Keng (Bonlop Lomnoi) occasionally looking away when the supposed eye contact grows…
Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré have amassed a remarkable body of work, and “body” is certainly an apt descriptor. Their intimate and playful films are concerned with social interactions and the world surrounding them; last year in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, Creton premiered Un Prince, which seemed like a…
“This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature “Force, presence, shape, they were all only words and none of them mattered. It wore many masks, but it was all…
The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard A fabulistic streak tints the proceedings of The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard, David Verbeek’s ninth feature, with a sheen of greyscale anonymity that lays the foundations for an apocalyptic fairytale. This designation itself harbors a tension between the primordial…
Cinematographer Bill Pope must have done something awful in 2022. Maybe he ran over some studio executive’s cat or perhaps his children beat out the wrong financier’s kids in soccer tryouts. Whatever it was, the film gods have been out to get him ever since. He once worked…
Dag Johan Haugerud’s approach to dialogue — in which two privately rapt characters waffle between a listener’s patience and a preening sense of self-regard — does not, in and of itself, doom his trilogy project. Sex, which preceded Love and Dreams on the festival circuit, but is being…
As much as critics have lapped up Egoyan’s description of Exotica as an “emotional striptease,” lauding the film for gradually unveiling the layers behind the characters’ actions through its unusual structure, there hasn’t been a sufficient reckoning with the depth of the term. However much a stripper discards…