Today we understand the university to be a uniquely reactive flashpoint for the major social, political, and generational battles defining the contemporary world. Yet…
Many critics have already labeled Joanna Armow’s laboriously titled The Feeling That the Time For Doing Something Has Passed a “millennial” comedy (a fitting…
It’s undeniably passé — and often critically fruitless — to note the difficult “art of adaptation” when it comes to translating literature for the…
One of the great “what ifs?” for filmgoers of a certain age is the now somewhat faded-from-memory Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration From Dusk Till…
Of all contemporary genres, horror seems the most susceptible to pastiche and the endless recycling of familiar tropes. Sequels and reboots are released at…
Guy Ritchie has always been a bit of an aggressive but empty stylist. Right out of the gate with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking…
Imtiaz Ali, classified as an auteur for skewering the conventional (in)sensibility of Bollywood’s melodramatic romances, is actually somewhat unclassifiable. He began his career in…
A specter is haunting cinema — that of commercial modernity. The media powers of the hyper-modern world, unlike the institutions of Old Europe with…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion…
A pregnant woman nearing delivery self-pleasures by rubbing her privates against a bedpost. An attempted murder, in a flavor reminiscent of the book of…
There are two films that writer-director Zarrar Kahn struggles to reconcile in his feature-length debut In Flames. The first, a domestic drama about women…
With Yannick, filmmaker and absurdist Quentin Dupieux has synthesized the irreverent, a product of his usual gags and conceits, and the satirical, afforded by…
Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim…
Fewer subgenres in recent memory have had a more fleeting window of viability, if ever it even really existed, than the “pandemic film.” Beyond…
With his breakout directorial feature Ex Machina, Alex Garland reduced a story that demanded to question the relationship between a body and a soul…
Ned Benson’s The Greatest Hits opens with its heroine, Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a young librarian, standing alone in her beautifully half-lit, tranquil apartment before…
Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji’s feature directorial debut, Omen, is a promising if not confident fable. Koffi (Mark Zinga) and Alice (Lucie Debay) return home to…
Does pop culture really need another Tom Ripley adaptation? That’s a fair question, considering just a couple of summers ago the fashion world was…