Two Pianos In an old interview with David Ehrlich, filmmaker and critic Kent Jones recalls a conversation with Arnaud Desplechin in which the great French director told him “a script is a very small thing. The movie is the thing.” It's a wonderfully succinct summation of Desplechin's interests as an artist; there's always a story,
A suspicious disappearance of a teenage girl in a small town on the Côte d’Azur sends a young woman searching and spiraling in the Cartesian truth drama Affection Affection. It’s the winter season, and the picturesque little town is troubled by minor mysteries, from a missing white puppy…
Eight Bridges James Benning is a master of moments. Over a career that spans five decades and twice as many modal deviations, Benning abstracts the American Problem through cinematic experiments as alienating as they are precise. To label the director’s films “slow cinema” would be to imply too…
Howard Wiseman’s self-described “quasi-history” of dark age Britain, Then Arthur Fought: The Matter of Britain, is an account of the historical material — matières, as the original French classification of medieval heroic tales goes — that has been, over the centuries, reconfigured as romance, legend, and myth in…
Succeeding the opening text of Amilcar is a close-up on a man’s face depicted in ultra-slow speed, soon revealed as interview footage, amidst a disorienting sound design. He wears a pair of angular spectacles and turns his gaze away from the camera. He dons a puzzled and pensive…
“And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I…
The concept of being a flop, a loser, a dud, an empty promise, and a failure in 2026. The new year is already growing old, but the pressure that came in with it grows ever more ripe. Following the straightforward lines of production and consumption along which time…
After A New Love in Tokyo, Banmei Takahashi turned beyond the mortal realm. Japan was fine. His films — whether through home video as V-Cinema or the erotic underground of pink film — had championed women. Sex work was not shamed. Instead, these women were human and searched for…
Italian-American documentarian Gianfranco Rosi has been making films for 30 years, but they’ve never quite been entirely about what is shown on the screen. His 2010 critical breakout El Sicario, Room 164 found him alone in a hotel room with a Mexican cartel hitman who’d previously used that…
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! brashly announces in its opening title card that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein on a dare, and that’s an ethos the film itself has internalized. A postmodern, thumb-in-the-eye of a film that wears its politics loudly, the film functions as an exceedingly loose adaptation of both Shelley’s…
With miscarriage after miscarriage of justice, the United States has all but exposed the amorality at the heart of its empire: first the Epstein files were withheld, then they were redacted, then they found limited release, and, when released, were blatantly defended by the very conditions under which…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome as circumscribed by the city’s major beltway. Fire at Sea (2016) considered the refugee crisis by focusing on life on the island of…
An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes meeting mine, “that we are so base and low, so utterly lost, that we must deprave ourselves and our fellows? I believe in…
The Bluff isn’t the same kind of pirate film as Pirates of the Caribbean. Unlike the leviathan Disney franchise, The Bluff has very little seafaring, the violence is grueling, and it’s about small folk rather than rich captains and governors’ daughters. The perspective shift is the film’s main…
In those chilly days of the Romantic poet, Samuel Coleridge sought to distinguish two synonyms. What is imagination, and what is fancy? He had this to say: “Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the…
Where is the line between genuine love and selfish devotion? That’s the question bubbling at the center of Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s sophomore feature, Honey Bunch. The directing duo, now a couple, having gotten together while making revenge-thriller Violation, keep finding much to mine in the deep,…
In “Wuthering Heights” — as Emerald Fennell sees it — death and ecstasy rest on the head of the same pin. Its opening credits are set to what sounds like someone groaning in pleasure on a squeaking bed; it’s soon revealed to be the last gasps of a…
Krakatoa If one were to conjure an impression of the apocalypse, it might be in the heart of sound — a detonation so vast and infinite that all imaginable existence would cease. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove lent no little irony to the proceedings of annihilation when it overlaid its…
The haze of childhood offers considerable dwelling space for joy and grievance alike; forceful then but mostly latent now, these emotions nonetheless bear the transformative power that frequently molds children into the adults they love and fear most. For seven-year-old Swee Swee (Ong Xuan Jing), the effervescent protagonist…
Luc Besson, famed French director of Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element, returns from making the relatively obscure June and John (2025) to release the highest-grossing French film of last year, Dracula. Subtitled A Love Tale in some territories, Besson’s Dracula is puerile and flamboyant. It has…