Nomadland Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip assessment…
Legally Declared Dead Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and played…
Unleashed & Geran Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home…
Mainstream Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has demonstrated its allure among filmmakers, and it’s easy to understand…
Cuties is an impressive, complex coming-of-age narrative and a profound refutation of the nonsensical controversy that has arisen around it. The hysteria surrounding Maïmouna Doucouré’s…
Sibyl is a film that feels richer at the margins than at the center, largely by design and to its credit. Victoria, Justine Triet’s last film, opens…
Beasts Clawing at Straws The new Korean crime thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws is a derivative, charmless bit of Tarantino-aping nonsense, a convoluted mess so…
Mulan fails as action spectacle and lazily cribs from the vast cinematic legacy it so loosely approximates. After such massive financial successes as Beauty and the…
Swanberg’s latest represents a savvy and mature return to his early-career mode of filmmaking. Fifteen years after his first feature, Joe Swanberg is back where…
Modern-day Cuba, as documented in Hubert Sauper’s latest foray into political ethnography, is a third-world island marked distinctly by the stamp of first-world capitalism. Co-existing…
Undergods Undergods is a crypto-anthology film that gradually morphs into a distaff network narrative, one of those everyone-is-connected type movies that were all the rage…
For all of Tenet’s ostensible narrative novelty and talk of the future, it is, in the end, a dismayingly familiar experience. It makes some degree…
Coastal Elites is a tone-deaf and formally lazy film that ignores issues of substance in favor of a facile call for civility. Anyone concerned that the…
Nomad is a passionate and heartfelt work, but Herzog’s foregrounded presence sometimes distracts from film’s more mystical ambitions. In January 1989, the legendary British adventurer, writer,…
Iannucci’s latest isn’t quite a natural fit for the director, but he still mostly succeeds by injecting his trademark levity into the spirited core of…
The Dark & the Wicked It’s unfortunate that Bryan Bertino’s debut feature was 2008’s The Strangers. The film is the 21st century’s best instance of…
Wonders in the Suburbans is an unwieldy affair, taking supposedly comedic pot-shots at any number of targets without any clear vision. Jeanne Balibar’s brand of idiosyncrasy…
Dolan’s latest intrigues in deviating from the director’s familiar mode, but its busyness never fully distills into any cogent statement. Matthias & Maxime, the 2019…
Face the Music doesn’t possess the rambunctious energy of its predecessors, but is hopeful and good-natured in a way too few comedies achieve these days. Just…
The low-stakes Get Duked! thankfully proves to be a more spirited and memorable comedy than its godawful title suggests. It has to be said: Get…
The Reckoning On its face, The Reckoning seems like a strange follow-up for director Neil Marshall, after last year’s mid-budget Hellboy reset. Then again, given…