A cautionary tale of Hollywood hubris that’s essentially been lost to time — thus negating its effectiveness as said cautionary tale — Dick Powell’s 1956…
How does one approach a film that reveals everything about itself in its opening sequence? Do we applaud its ability to summarize its themes succinctly?…
If you watch Trigger Warning, Netflix’s latest big-budget action movie, with captions turned on, you may notice the phrase “terrorist, in Arabic” in the film’s…
Covered in paint, drawn from hell, the Swedish soft-metal-theatrical-intractable band Ghost has been ascending toward the surface of mainstream pop-cultural stardom since their 2022 album…
Two households, both alike in silent grief, In fair Midwest town, where we lay our scene, From ancient sorrow break to new relief, Where art…
Spare a thought for the enfant terrible who finds themselves just this side of respectable. The filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has, over the past 15 years,…
Maybe more than any of its brethren of subgenre monsters, the exorcism film The Exorcist (1973) looms large over its brood of descendants. There are…
“The physical world relies on a much more complex universe. Like fish who cannot see the water they are in, we are immersed in something…
A mother and daughter’s symbiotic bond fuels the artistic crucible that underlies Janet Planet. Such a description, let alone the title, might indicate a film…
It’s hard to find much at all to say about Thelma, an agreeably light, mostly affectionate comedy that basically seems calculated to make you want…
Playing exactly how one expects a film inspired by a book of photography might, Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders is a series of striking images of a nascent…
Sadly, the title of Ariane Louis-Seize’s debut feature tells you virtually everything you need to know about the film itself. The Quebecois horror-comedy Humanist Vampire…
When Russia invaded Ukraine in the winter of 2022, it was widely observed how accepting bordering nations were of millions of displaced Ukrainians fleeing the…
It’s an awkward phase, that post-graduation purgatory where possibilities seem endless, endlessly limited, or both — or so I’m told, I never went to college…
From VR to AI and NFT, from Metaverse to cutting-edge computer games and interface technologies, it’s quite clear that both our existential and psychological states…
The dominant perspective in Pixar’s films about childhood — most significantly, the Toy Story entries and Inside Out — is that of the parent trying…
In the opening moments of Firebrand, we meet Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a fervent reformer preaching against the Church of England during King Henry VIII’s…
Since 2011, animator and director Don Hertzfeldt has focused on one topic: memory. In the tripartite It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the loss of memory…
Director Jang Jae-hyun’s new supernatural thriller Exhuma covers a lot of ground during its two-plus hour runtime; what begins as a detailed procedural gradually gives…
In Tiger Stripes, Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature, a trio of twelve-year-old girls contend with the sudden and inexplicable physical changes that occur inside one…
Co-opting traditions as metaphors for the struggles of everyday life has always been cinema’s staple, either because these traditions romanticize the world or because they…