Youssef Chebbi’s horror-tinged police procedural Ashkal (being released in the States officially as Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation) begins with a brief explanation of The Gardens of Carthage,…
According to certain cinephilic thinking — specifically arguments that come from those who worship at the altars of Michael Mann and Tony Scott — director…
In a rather brazen move, the third title card in the end credits of new horror flick Don’t Look Away reads as a dedication to…
Mother Lode straddles a few different lines in its depiction of the grueling lives of gold miners in the mountains of Peru. For all practical…
David Depesseville’s debut feature, Astrakan, is a film that is at once deeply humanist and utterly pitiless. Essentially a character study, the film depicts the…
Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil takes the broad, familiar strokes of the revenge drama and fashions them into something altogether more tragic. The film…
Jennifer Reeder’s new film Perpetrator has received some very strong reviews at Berlinale, and to be honest, it takes a while to figure out exactly…
Far too many movies demand far too little from viewers. Maybe they aren’t asking the right questions, or perhaps the questions themselves are just going…
The metatextual fortune cookie message (e.g. “Help! I’m being held hostage in a fortune cookie factory!”) is an obvious premise for a joke, indeed one…
In a recent think piece for Salon, critic Sam Adams asks “Where did all the hacks go?” He’s mainly talking about Disney’s penchant for foisting…
Ingenuous, low-budget sci-fi is having a moment. It’s been a long time since Primer and Upstream Color, or even Coherence or Timecrimes. But recent festival offerings like The Artifice Girl and Aporia suggest that…
Independent filmmaker Anna Biller (Viva, The Love Witch) recently stirred up a mini-tempest on the website formerly known as Twitter, calling out — sight unseen…
British director Charlotte Regan’s feature debut, Scrapper, is a vibrant and charismatic film on the joys and heartbreak of adolescence and newfound fatherhood. Set and…
Of all horror films, no work is referenced, paid homage, or just plain ripped-off more than The Shining. Most films are satisfied to take a…
Though the blues and jazz and bluegrass and country and frankly the whole catalogue of American music comes from the American South, the region’s role…
Kamila Andini’s latest film considers the tragedy of life in her home nation of Indonesia. But despite this scope of Before, Now & Then, it’s…
Gone are the days of Mortal Kombat, Double Dragon, BloodRayne, Max Payne, and even Warcraft. Video game adaptations used to promise a Faustian bargain where…
Here’s a scenario: your day starts with a pregnancy scare. Then, you find your sister has run away from school, and on top of that…
Animation is a tool that has been sporadically utilized to shade in the gaps of history within a subjective consciousness. These subjectivities often pertain to…
We’ve come a long way since Mister Ed. The central gimmick of Josh Greenbaum’s Strays, an R-rated comedy about a foursome of misfit dogs traveling…
The logline of The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa’s follow-up to Person to Person (2016), does not appreciably differ from that of a prototypical Sundance movie.…