Honorable Mention: Licorice Pizza is, like almost every other Paul Thomas Anderson movie, about America. More specifically it is about America as embodied in…
Honorable Mention: After the WWII-set Phoenix (a production so emotionally taxing it seems to have severed the relationship between the director and his long-time…
Honorable Mention: A quick glimpse at the one-sheet for Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon doesn’t inspire much hope. A black-and-white flick with both auto- and…
Honorable Mention: It’s Christmas, the time of miracles, and there’s been no greater cinematic miracle this holiday/award season than the fact that Paul Verhoeven…
Honorable Mention: Leave it to Sean Baker to direct poverty porn. After the much-celebrated The Florida Project, a fantastical if somewhat aestheticised survey of…
#21. Hong Sang-soo’s films generally fall somewhere between melodrama and farce, but to classify them as such is to no doubt essentialize them as…
#22. James Wan’s 40-million-dollar check, signed and sealed by a grateful Warner Bros. in recompense for the success of Aquaman, enables a continuation of his…
#23. After a gap between series entries wide enough to accommodate a live-action Godzilla flick, Hideaki Anno concluded his long-running mecha anime Neon Genesis…
#24. Siberia flaunts Abel Ferrara’s enthralling and fearless devotion to a uniquely dynamic (and specifically filmic) form of psychological expressionism — an approach that is…
#25. “Say like The Black Album was like The Black Movie. So the soundtracks are like scores to scenes that’s going on in the movie.…
#16. The burden of tradition makes itself felt throughout Chaitanya Tamhane’s sophomore feature, The Disciple. The story template is familiar: that of a striving artist…
#17. On its surface an ode to disappearing print journalism and the power of a good editor, The French Dispatch finds Wes Anderson using…
#18. In a time of corporate sameness – in which films operate based on formula that are formally and structurally identical and guaranteed to…
#19. Of all the new phrases to emerge into the online vernacular, one of the most useful has to be “main character syndrome.” Describing…
#20. Right after a brief voiceover intro that immediately breaks the fourth wall, Leos Carax’s Annette cuts into the opening — or more appropriately,…
11. Helen Keller is one of those historical figures whose legacy has been so white-washed by history that it has become a kind of…
#12. Oft-explained as an homage to the mechanical body horror of David Cronenberg, Julia Ducournau’s surprise Palme d’Or winning follow-up to Raw is too often…
#13. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Emblazoned on…