There are brief glimpses of confounding breadth present in JUNG_E, most cogent when projected across the extensive digital dreamscape that is this world’s reality. Director…
The latest film from Light Chaser Animation Studios, New Gods: Yang Jian, continues several ongoing trends in its development as a production house: first, a…
For most people, the protests on January 6, 2021, represent a dismal blight on American history; a rot that had corroded its way to the…
Grief casts a long shadow. Aleem Khan’s After Love largely places itself in the darkness that comes before the hopeful ascent, drawing power from its…
In 1843, Karl Marx decided he would move away from Cologne to a land that would be more open to his ideas, more open in every…
A rare dramatic turn from Anna Kendrick, Alice, Darling surprises with its nuanced, twitchy lead performance. Alice (Kendrick) chooses to lie to her emotionally abusive…
While it never quite led to the promise of a more democratic cinematic landscape, there’s now an entire history of digital movie-making that exists both…
Film trailers sometimes embellish the truth, and other times overturn it entirely; Sony Pictures Classics’ preview of The Son, however, proves remarkably faithful to the…
In the commentary track to Grown-Ups (1980), one of eight television films Mike Leigh made for the BBC, the director remarks that many of his…
Li Xiaofeng’s Back to the Wharf begins with a tragic accident that escalates, shockingly, to murder. After high school student Song Hao (Zhou Zhengjie) stumbles…
From a certain angle, 2022 could be seen as the year of satire. There spectrum was vast, from the “high-brow,” like Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning…
It’s something of a fool’s errand to try to trace broad trends throughout a full festival lineup — most critics don’t see anywhere near the…
Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful Beings is a brutal yet abundantly tender coming-of-age tale that examines how intergenerational trauma mars the friendships that teenagers…
Premiering at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and dropping into U.S. theaters in the autumn, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO was a film that…
Shot on location in New Mexico in early 2021, Pete Ohs’ Jethica is a kind of minimalist sunbaked noir that gradually transforms into something altogether…
Even in the seemingly endless combinations and reconfigurations of tropes that make up horror B-movies, there occasionally needs to be some new input. Dusty old…
The past invades the future in Paul Owens’ Landlocked, a low-budget, minimalist horror drama that’s steeped in the nostalgic haze of VHS grain and childhood…
While the ongoing Liam Neeson dad-action-movie concern has been producing ever more diminishing returns, over the last decade and change, just about nobody has so…
Quoth Christine Choy, the Oscar-losing documentary filmmaker, notoriously candid NYU professor, and pseudo-subject of Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles: “You know, the thing…
In only a few short years, writer-director John Swab has churned out a handful of low-budget features that have rarely risen above the mantle of…
From the first frame of Alcarràs, Carla Simón alerts the viewer to the integrality of the summery Catalonian landscape of her film. Within these windswept…