Desolate, grim, and hopelessly introverted, The Boss’s album Nebraska captures a slice of America that’s as caustic and fresh today as it was in 1981. You put it on, and you’re there: sipping a Miller Lite in a lonely roadhouse, trawling a boardwalk in the dead of night,…
Exactly how does one go about commencing a review for something titled Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc? Some useful context is in order: Chainsaw Man began life as a (still-running) manga series created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, with the first volume originally published in 2018. The series…
It’s been a quarter century since The Blair Witch Project first terrorized unsuspecting audiences. In the ensuing years, it’s been difficult to find much innovation in the found footage subgenre. More often a clearing house for cheap streaming filler or a quick, no-frills calling card for ambitious young…
This evening, like every evening, you settle in to listen to a song from Cole Porter’s songbook. There is nothing like the sharp lash of Cole Porter that assures one of American ingenuity. There is nothing like the affirmation of Cole Porter that reminds you that it is…
1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is B-movie perfection, a secretly elegant story of women in competition that satirizes both maternity and sorority. And on top of that, the film gives viewers a diabolically great performance from Rebecca De Mornay as its villain, a woman out for…
Die, My Love There comes a tale from an antique land. A King ruled over a thin Isthmus, above and below which were two unfathomably large continents. A boat launched in the West Sea could not make port in the East, nor could a boat launched in the…
Troubled souls trapped: the parameters of a typical Claire Denis narrative are rarely complex. Beau Travail’s French Foreign Legion soldiers were confined to their base in Djibouti, High Life’s condemned criminals to their spacecraft, and The Fence’s action occurs almost entirely on a construction site, in an unspecified…
Hamnet A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar with the plot of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, about William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and the death of their titular son,…
I Know This Much is True is the 2020s best work of narrative art so far, unjustly buried by its just-exactly-wrong release over the course of six weeks in the spring following the onset of COVID-19. It was the latest in Derek Cianfrance’s cycle of kitchen sink miserabilist…
Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of the filmmaker’s scrappy, discursive gab-fests as it does a conventional biopic. Almost entirely confined to a tavern location, presented mostly in real-time and starring the…
Is This Thing On? Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured a singer, a composer, and now a standup comedian in his work. His latest, Is This Thing On? — a film brought to…
As far as the so-called Berlin School is concerned, the films of Ulrich Köhler have mostly led a somewhat peripheral existence — which is less to comment on their popularity with general audiences or accolades among festival juries and critics than on their jaggedness of genre, tone, and…
In his 1998 monograph on gay male identification with the Broadway musical, Place for Us: Essay on the American Musical, D.A. Miller identifies the archetypal “showtune” as a mechanism for self-delusion: to whistle a happy tune or proclaim that everything’s coming up roses when one’s life is spiraling…
After the massive success of John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian in 1982, an avalanche of cheap sword-and-sorcery pictures flowed forth, eager to cash in on the newly viable genre. Never one to miss out on an emerging box office trend (and running out of ideas for Alien knock-offs),…
No Other Choice “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Frederic Jameson No one seems to enjoy the world we live in — in fact, everyone seems to hate it. Yet most of us accept it, see it as the…
Coming to NYFF by way of the Giornate degli Artori in Venice, Gabriel Azorín’s debut feature is a bold swing for the fences, the sort of challenging and ambitious film that ought to be more common from first-timers. To say that Azorín’s reach exceeds his grasp is no…
Blue Moon Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of the filmmaker’s scrappy, discursive gab-fests as it does a conventional biopic. Almost entirely confined to a tavern location, presented mostly in real-time and…
“All films are time travel films, and all films are ghost films,” said filmmaker Mark Jenkin at a post-screening Q&A for the New York Film Festival premiere of his new film, Rose of Nevada. This sentiment certainly applies to Jenkin’s films, preoccupied as they are with cycles that…
The streets of Beirut are covered in red dirt. Mounds of earth make up barricades along the highway, cars duck around the man-made mountains as they amble down the road. The Lebanese Civil War has been raging for 10 years, and somehow Jocelyne Saab was able to make…
Dracula Radu Jude is aiming for nothing less than the grand finale of vampire movies with his Dracula, and as a Romanian, why shouldn’t he lay claim to his heritage? This sprawling three-hour epic opens with a parade of A.I.-generated Vlad the Impalers telling us to suck their…