Saccharine was inevitable. In the Western world, there’s never been a worse time to have a body. Navigating the Internet is an exercise in polarity…
To fully appreciate — or even comprehend — a project like Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe would require extensive foreknowledge of…
From a certain point of view, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War is emblematic of the state of modern filmmaking. For one thing, a resurgence…
Centered in a sepia-toned frame, two young, Black girls sit on a park bench, their backs to the camera. Another child passing by smears one…
A monkey’s paw-inspired horror film that’s not-so-secretly about the loss of free will and specifically women being subjugated by their partners, Obsession — from 26-year-old…
Not Arthur Rimbaud, but A. Rimbaud. The title of Patrick Wang’s latest film is the skeleton key that unlocks the principles behind its approach to…
When Affection opens, our protagonist (Jessica Rothe) is facedown on a road. It would appear she’s been in a car wreck. She stands up, stumbles…
If you’re trying to escape from Anywhere, perhaps the only alternative is… nowhere. This is the agonizing reality that director Alberto Vázquez (Birdboy, Unicorn Wars)…
Only one month after The Christophers opened in theaters, we have been gifted another film about art forgery in the form of Jing Ai Ng’s…
Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the…
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over a decade after the annexation of Crimea, a desire to put the inner…
The world has changed a lot since The Collingswood Story pioneered Screenlife storytelling in 2002. Nickelback had the top single that year, mid-budget films still…
James Cameron is the last gunslinger who knows what to do with 3D (at least until Ang Lee is released from Director Jail), although countless…
It’s a marketer’s dream title, isn’t it: The Sheep Detectives. Straight to the point and brain-tickling. Indeed, considering the slick, straight-to-Amazon Prime aesthetic, it wouldn’t…
In Annihilation, Florida writer Jeff VanderMeer writes, “When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.” That novel’s…
More an indictment of pop referentiality than a true reflection of psyche, the opening minute of Katarina Zhu’s Bunnylovr edges toward a pat diagnosis of…
If you’re looking for a supposed “fresh set of eyes” in your criticism, I am the ideal audience for Mortal Kombat II. I haven’t seen…
Elliot Tuttle’s sophomore feature, Blue Film, arrives hot on the heels of controversy — or so we’re meant to believe. It premiered last year at…
No civilization without land was the starting point of Carl Schmitt’s definition of the nomos — the measure by which land “in a particular order…
The starting point for anything one might observe about the nature of money in the world today needs run, if one is to be sensible,…
Looking with a cynical eye, one might accuse Ildikó Eyendi — and not just in Silent Friend — of banality. The film’s three stories, taken…