Films like Booksmart, Mean Girls (the 2024 musical version), and other more recent entries into the teen movie canon have proven that it’s an increasingly…
At it’s best, Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us manages to evoke Stephen King’s It. Based on Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, the…
Once the purview of Dateline NBC, 20/20, and 48 Hours, the surge of true-crime podcasts and Netflix documentaries has led to an explosion of amateur…
Marx’s vampires and specters; the oil crisis, Vietnam War, and industrializing slaughterhouses as the background for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the commodification of the spectacularly…
Both a post-#MeToo reckoning and a speculative account of the sort of behavior that could have transpired on billionaire Jeffrey Epstien’s island, Blink Twice —…
With 2024 marking the arrival of their eighth co-directed feature (with a couple additional co-director credits going to daughter Zelda in recent efforts), the projects…
Before throwing us into the story proper, JT Mollner’s Strange Darling informs us that it was “shot entirely on 35mm film.” It’s a strange inclusion,…
Belgian writer-director Claude Schmitz’s third feature, The Other Laurens, is a dry-humor thriller with an existential neo-noir façade. Viewers expecting a tense, philosophical slow-burn akin…
Víctor Erice’s Close Your Eyes opens to a beautiful autumnal scene of the French countryside in 1947: an old fictional mansion (called “Triste le Roy”)…
Pandemic films seem to arrive now with an amount of healthy attendant skepticism. Do we really want to keep reliving these moments of our lives?…
Writing about the recent Cuckoo, critic Willow Maclay asks: “does a film starring a trans person have a duty to say something specific about transness?”…
Monica Sorelle’s feature debut, Mountains, is refreshingly simple. It follows demolition worker Xavier (Abiton Nazaire), a Haitian immigrant living in the Little Haiti neighborhood of…
It’s not much of a revelation to suggest that Sundance has gradually moved away from its independent roots and transformed into something more akin to…
The psychoanalytic term of the “big Other” is a fancy shorthand for our symbolic social order, and it’s what delimits most of our everyday lives…
In 2014, Dawn DaLuise, a renowned Hollywood facialist, was arrested and charged with solicitation for murder after being accused of hiring a hitman to kill…
Karma’s a bitch. JoJo Siwa warned us all earlier this summer, and so the timing of her latest film (and the first that isn’t tween-appealing…
Genre films — especially horror films — tend to let you do a lot with a little. If you can sell a novel idea with…
Advanced mathematics on film is often treated as a gateway to mental illness (Pi) or espionage (The Imitation Game) or in some instances both (A…
Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien was simultaneously a landmark science fiction film and a landmark horror film, one that married slasher and haunted house scares…
As America heads toward an increasingly tumultuous and unpredictable future, it comes as no surprise that there are filmmakers who are champing at the bit…
Death and destruction are the mainstays of war, but it is war’s fatigue — long-drawn and uncertain, for both its combatants and victims — that…