About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas…
Shot on grainy 16mm and scored by loopy, synth approximations of classical instruments, Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail sets up a dialectical…
The rapid ascension of Ryan Coogler as a pop-filmmaker of some stature has taken a somewhat counterintuitive route. After bursting onto the scene with…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid.…
When last we left Alex Garland, he was busy parsing the American left/right divide and the moral responsibilities of war journalism in the phenomenally…
Rhetorically, the threatening specter of militarism looms just out of frame in Makbul Mubarak’s debut feature, Autobiography, a work extrapolated from the political and…
It’s always a strange experience when a self-consciously campy horror film pulls out something genuinely emotional, if only for about a minute. Christopher Landon’s…
DIRECT ACTION, co-directed by Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell, traces the outer contours and inner lives of the persons within the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes…
With his latest feature, director Robert Schwentke has moved away from his Time Traveler’s Wife, Divergent, Snake Eyes-days of bad blockbuster filmmaking. Seneca —…
Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A…
If the new indie neo-noir Gazer feels familiar, riffing on any number of classic thrillers as well as newer models like Memento and Too…
It’s 1987 in Oakland, California. The Golden State Warriors are trying to avoid being swept by the Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals, feuding…
More than ever, questions of form and the constitution of cinema swirl, boundaries challenged or collapsing regularly in a present where visual media is…
Watching the opening credits of Mimi Cave’s Holland, one would not be entirely remiss to recall the barren sound stage of Lars von Trier’s…
David Ayer’s movies have often straddled the line between edgelord wannabe grit and cartoonish macho fantasy — although his best films, like WWII tank…
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to…
If there’s one place in the world you’d want to make your debut, it’s France. Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow opens with a string of…
The opening shot ofTrương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam depicts two men in enveloping darkness. One carries the other on his back as he…