Non-fiction scenarios and non-professional actors are often characterized as so rich and unpredictable that all a director needs to be is a receiver for…
The past decade suggests an encroaching — or, perhaps at this point, arrived — renaissance in Indigenous art. Regardless of the medium, native voices…
When talking about Mouchette, his acclaimed 1967 drama, Robert Bresson said that the put-upon titular character “offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is…
It’s quaint to look back on it now, but there was a time when making a film based on an amusement park ride was…
It’s not quite accurate to describe Darkness as magic realism, but it’s not strictly a genre piece, either. Much like the children at the…
Metanarratives have long-embodied the postmodern sensibility of ironic detachment by creating cultural products that are both self-acknowledging and effacing. They explore the very idea…
Having already mined Transformers, Tetris, and, of course, Barbie, for their cinematic potential, it was only a matter of time before another nostalgic toy…
Like his (still-undistributed, in North America) previous film, 2017’s Walking Past the Future, Li Ruijun’s latest, Return to Dust (an official selection of this…
From the outset, writer-director Laurence Vannicelli’s Mother, May I? appears to contain little in the way of originality, a two-character chamber drama that is…
Young filmmakers making gangster-adjacent genre films is a time-honored tradition — it’s a mode of moviemaking with a built-in propensity for ready-made conflict, violence,…
Following his loose trilogy of Oakland-based documentaries, Peter Nicks returns to spotlight arguably the most dynamic professional basketball player of the last decade. Golden…
Long serving as a fun bit of Internet trivia to stoke the engagement machine, fervently celebrated actor/writer/director Greta Gerwig’s canceled 2014 CBS pilot —…
Of the three leads in They Cloned Tyrone, Juel Taylor’s wild conspiracy caper, not one is actually named Tyrone. It’s a slight detail that…
It’s the week leading up to Halloween and a child wakes in the middle of the night, having been roused by an unexpected, unsettling…
Hard Rain meets Crawl in The Flood, director Brandon Slagle’s ultra-low-budget creature feature that would feel right at home in the 11:00 PM Tuesday…
On July 7th, 2006, Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett died of pancreatic cancer and complications from diabetes at the age of sixty. Although he was…
Kids these days don’t even know what film, this emulsive material, is, as a talking head insipidly points out in Alex Winter’s strained and…
Los Alamos, New Mexico: Apache country. Just a half-hour drive from Santa Fe, the land of Los Alamos was sparse but beautiful. The land…