The modern live-action superhero flick often suffers from a weightlessness problem. These spectacular behemoths dazzle with their cornucopia of digital pleasures, yet the further our…
There’s an undeniable novelty that introduces Thomas Hardiman’s directorial debut, Medusa Deluxe. On its surface, the film promises to be a lively, twisty — quite…
At first glance, there may be nothing necessarily wrong with Antoine Barraud’s third feature film, Madeleine Collins; on the contrary, it quickly evokes a certain…
Dead Shot opens in south Armagh, what the British soldiers call “Bandit Country,” in 1973 on a border ambush gone wrong. In pursuit of IRA…
Genre filmmaking is in a weird place currently, and has been for a while now. Self-referentiality, endless didacticism, and an absence of any sense of…
Kôji Fukada has described Ozu this way: “He’s one of the true greats, while I am not.” To take a line from Hasumi’s criticism: if,…
Cory Finely’s Landscape With Invisible Hand is an innocuous, flimsy little sci-fi movie, bandying about high concepts and reasonably detailed world-building but resolutely refusing to…
For a work whose subject matter purports to straddle the lofty and permanent, its subject appears remarkably contingent. The Eternal Memory, Maite Alberdi’s latest documentary…
The age of streaming is the age of accelerated attention — attention caught, swept away, and crystallized in breathless signification. Breathless, because what underlines this…
Crime-thriller road films are a long-beloved American trademark, from Badlands to True Romance. In his new feature The Passenger, Carter Smith takes us on a…
Jared Moshé’s Aporia is a rare thing indeed: a high-concept, hard sci-fi head-scratcher that still feels human-scaled thanks to sensitive performances and focus on familial…
Hong Kong auteur Soi Cheang is a modern B-movie master whose works have dipped into an assortment of subgenres. Cheang’s aesthetic language is in constant…
Before the age of BookTok commenced, which both invigorated the eternally dying publishing industry and perhaps brought about the death of literature by pushing sub-AI…
A trio of octogenarians have a close encounter of the third kind in Jules, director Marc Turtletaub’s high-concept dramedy that is, strangely enough, not the…
In Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, Juliette Binoche’s character, Marianne, is introduced as a credibly depressing symptom of the global economy. In her fifties and…
Since I was a boy, gaunt and ghoulish, raised on the children’s renditions of Edgar Allan Poe and those silly Goosebumps books, I’ve been obsessed…
Early on in What Comes Around, Amy Redford’s sophomore feature (coming after a 15-year hiatus), it becomes clear that logic will be an absent player.…
For centuries, humanity has found ways to outsource certain aspects of childbirth, but these advances were mostly limited to wet nurses, surrogate pregnancies, and, later,…
The directorial duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel have been regulars on the festival circuit for the better part of twenty years, but they…
Randall Park’s directorial debut, Shortcomings, is sure to draw immediate comparisons to Crazy Rich Asians, a film that made $238 million and was praised for…
Do we still need the album? That question — elicited by the advent of streaming music platforms and the musicians’ newfound ability to self-publish songs…