Like the best fiction for young children, the secret to Roald Dahl’s bibliography is its sensory qualities, that it can unlock new pathways in the…
Shadow in the Cloud holds some promise in its early genre goings, but the second half reveals an unfortunate dearth of ideas and charm. It’s never…
Herself is a well-intentioned but ultimately one-note message film that fails to build any real power. A patron of the British arts, Phyllida Lloyd’s transition from…
Pieces of a Woman showcases a bravura if ostentatious initial quarter, but it’s all downhill from there as the film devolves into mere misery porn tropes. …
With The Midnight Sky, George Clooney the director strikes again, delivering a bland, ugly film that is tedious and void of any emotional poignancy. George…
If those films inextricably linked to childhood experience — those movies, in Serge Daney’s words, “that watched us grow up and saw us… already entangled…
To delve into the world of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU. is to forgo the comfortable spectatorial positions of detachment and objectivity, and submit to its fantastical reconstruction of…
“The Seattle Mariners are eminently lovable, profoundly human, and stunningly, outrageously weird.” These words come courtesy of Jon Bois, writer, editor, animator, producer, and director…
What would it look like to adapt The Communist Manifesto to film? Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? Industrial Society and Its Future? These texts have no main characters to follow,…
The first 30 minutes of CoroNation, Ai Weiwei’s comprehensive snapshot of Wuhan, China in the earliest days of COVID-19’s global devastation, are among the most compelling…
If there is any affinity to be found between Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, it’s in their shared ability to turn the economics of filmmaking…
A deeply idiosyncratic survey of 20th-century political and social mores, director Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden transplants Jack London’s 1909 novel from the American West Coast…
Yourself and Yours almost slipped through the cracks. Released in 2016, in the space between the long-awaited breakthrough that was the 2015 release of Right Now, Wrong…
Spike Lee is doing pretty great these days, so much so that he’s been recast as a beloved elder statesman in the cultural memory. Not…
Soul is another complex, cosmic effort from Pixar, and a quietly joyous send-off to a relentlessly bleak year. It makes a certain sense to end 2020,…
Wonder Woman 1984 is bloated at 151 minutes, but the chemistry of its leads and throwback hokey vibes are enough to recommend its particular superhero pleasures.…
News of the World is a film of dangerously naïve messaging, erratic pacing, limited stakes, and little formal or technical craft to otherwise distract from…
Wong Ping’s Fables 2 The first of two fables in Wong Ping’s Fables 2 is entitled “Cow the Super-Rich.” It’s an amusing anti-capitalist tale about…
From our Honorable Mentions post: It goes without saying that 2020 was a year like none other in recent history. Significantly, by virtue of living through…
Promising Young Woman does its best to reshape the rape-revenge narrative into a novel form, but it ultimately fails to muster much ambiguity or thorniness. Heavy…