Steve Buscemi’s directorial efforts have tended to focus on outsiders and castoffs. In his 1996 debut, Trees Lounge, the hopeless and downhearted congregate at…
With 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, director Adam Wingard became one of the few Western filmmakers to realize that the kaiju movie is more a…
A man living by himself in a small, ramshackle house. A knock at the door. A stranger asking for help who may or may…
At the height of the pandemic, one of the more uplifting trends on social media were videos of people living in cities, clanging pots…
In an edition of surprises, programming eclecticism, and a refreshingly measured jury performance, Nicolas Philibert’s Golden Bear win for his latest documentary might yet…
In a sea of forgettable, workman-like mediocrity, let us appreciate Luc Besson’s DogMan for being something of a rarity: an honest-to-goodness fiasco born of…
“Toys are too preoccupied with fun,” Alejandro (Julio Torres) declares in a cover letter to Hasbro during the opening of Torres’ debut feature film…
Where do irony and sincerity stand today, both with respect to each other and to the cultural scene at large? A litmus test for…
Hollywood film scholar Thomas Schatz’s essay “Film Genre and the Genre Film” describes our relationship with the film genre as both static and dynamic.…
Russell Crowe plays ex-cop Roy Freeman in the mystery thriller Sleeping Dogs, a film that feels like it was made dispassionately by a committee…
With so much modern horror based in ’80s VHS nostalgia or mired in transmuting trauma, it’s enough that Late Night with the Devil’s set…
Rowdy Herrington’s 1989 opus Road House is, in the unironic view of this writer, a bona fide classic and one of the best American…
How old were you when you recognized that the villain of Ivan Reitman’s original Ghostbusters was the Environmental Protection Agency? Obviously, it’s the text…
Part of a generation of First Nations filmmakers that also includes Rachel Perkins (Radiance, Bran Nue Dae), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country,…
To the uninitiated, written descriptions of Radu Jude’s cinema might give the wrong impression of his films as dizzyingly dialectical exercises requiring a complete…
Irish Wish marks the second collaboration between Janeen Damian and Lindsay Lohan, after their lukewarm yet distinctly feel-good Falling for Christmas. Far from the…
Taken almost exclusively from the personal illustrated diaries of Frida Kahlo, Carla Gutierrez’s Frida brings the renowned artist’s painting to often breathtaking life through…
Chinese-Korean director Zhang Lu has been a bit of a slow burn in the West. Despite having directed 12 feature films since 2003, only…