Director Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist announces its particular tenor right from the opening scene, as Father Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe) arrives by moped to…
The latest installment of the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise, opens with a sequence that will be instantly recognizable to longtime fans of the…
Joaquin Phoenix’s first scene in Beau Is Afraid takes place in his therapist’s office, setting the story in motion while also presenting a roadmap of…
Art is subjective, as is the concept of firsts. Hilma af Klint can be classed as the first abstract painter, years before the more widely…
The hardest working man in show business, otherwise known as John Swab, is back with One Day as a Lion, the director’s third feature of…
Little Richard, born Richard Wayne Penniman, is a complicated figure in rock ‘n’ roll history not just because of the way his legacy as perhaps…
Everybody knows a low-stakes liar. Whether it’s Instagram exaggerations or anecdotes reconfigured to place themselves as the hero, this kind of one-upmanship is practically currency…
The first thing one is likely to notice about Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is how ugly its characters look. Their eyes are empty of that…
It’s perhaps unfair to say that divorce dramas have had too great a resurgence in recent years. The genre is by its nature a prime,…
André (André Dussollier) has a case of deep vein thrombosis in his right leg, complicated by a pulmonary embolism. He’s also just had a stroke,…
Superficially, it would be easy to locate filmmaking duo Jimmy Chin and Elisabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s documentary inclinations at some loose nexus of survival stories, adventure…
Given his recent critically and commercially successful, Oscar-winning film Drive My Car, it was only a matter of time before Japanese arthouse director Ryusuke Hamaguchi…
Religious iconography and the unofficial symbols of nationalism, when not one and the same, serve a similar purpose. A vehicle, a symbol of salvation if…
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body) is a veritable encyclopedia of the human form, a visual compendium…
If Stephanie Meyer ruined emo vampires for you, how about this slightly tweaked version, wherein a vampire’s familiar walks into a Codependents Anonymous meeting? That’s…
Japan is once again on the brink of picturesque collapse in the latest film from anime director Shinkai Makoto. Natural disasters, of course, have long…
High-concept comedy Mafia Mamma comes courtesy of Catherine Hardwicke, a director who never met a potentially interesting premise she couldn’t sabotage with her bland visual…
Teenagers are awful — that’s an objective truth. Throw in a hefty dose of economic privilege, and you’ve got the recipe for some real chickenshit…
Every weekday, middle-aged legal worker Andrew Rakowski gets in his car and commutes home through suburban Melbourne: and indeed, this constitutes the vast bulk of…
One of the many privileges of attending a film festival lies in watching the programs of shorts, cleverly curated such that one does not take…
Some action movies are best watched in the afternoon, the way they used to be shown on American television in the days before infomercials took…