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…
Inside a brightly lit Dunkin’ Donuts, Tyler, a construction worker, meets another, Widgey, who is about to hire him for a home renovation job. Tyler…
Don Hardy’s career as a documentary filmmaker has spanned an eclectic range of themes that are bound, in some way, by an interest in mystery,…
“From the mind of The RZA” and “presented” by Quentin Tarantino comes One Spoon of Chocolate. In the film, Shameik Moore plays a veteran, washed…
In an old interview with David Ehrlich, filmmaker and critic Kent Jones recalls a conversation with Arnaud Desplechin in which the great French director told…
Horror continually mines the dark crevices between belief and skepticism. Explorations of witchcraft, folklore, and the paranormal are fertile grounds for character-building, so that a…
At the beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length documentary, Our Land (originally titled Landmarks), we’re presented with satellite images of Earth. From this zoomed out…