Minari sets up opportunities for deep engagement, but it mostly forgoes those in favor a flattened series of simplistic, bittersweet vignettes as narrative. Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987), adapted from Marilynn Robinson’s novel of the same name, contains one of American cinema’s most marvelous, complexly portrayed…
With On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola reconfigures her pet themes into a welcomingly settled film that plays a lot like an NYC-set Somewhere. “It must be very nice to be you.” That’s what Laura (Rashida Jones) says to her gadfly dad Felix (Bill Murray)…
Kelly Reichardt’s latest treads familiar thematic territory, but her minimalist leanings here lend toward something altogether more expansive. First Cow is a film of beginnings and endings — and, thusly, also of returns. Kelly Reichardt‘s second period film marks the return of the 4:3…
Peter Strickland is a stylistic maximalist, an homage specialist who makes Tarantino look like a film school pedant. Along with Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani (Amer; Let the Corpses Tan), Strickland is the functional definition of ‘your mileage may vary’. His new film In Fabric is…
Having recently explored heroin-heavy, vagabond living in Heaven Knows What (2014) and a bank robber’s desperation in Good Time (2017), directors Benny and Josh Safdie glimpse a different class of criminal underworld in Uncut Gems, an audacious, hysterical window into the shady dealings of New York City jeweller Howard Ratner…
As the credits roll on Waves, against the blue, bright promise of an open sky, Alabama Shakes’s “Sound and Color” spills forth from the soundtrack. It’s a fitting choice, director Trey Edward Shults winking at himself, as the track could have pulled double-duty and…
The Lighthouse is, in some ways, the last film we need right now. A male-centric chamber piece, Robert Eggers’s latest revels in the grotesqueries of guydom: farts, hooch, and fisticuffs all make repeated appearances throughout. The film is even shot in such a way as to signal masculinity,…
We may have gotten to the point where not only is A24 curating its brand with obvious aesthetic guidelines, but also, we have fresh filmmakers out there recognizing those guidelines, and choosing to craft films with the A24 demographics in mind — much like…
Writer-director Guy Nattiv’s Skin isn’t just a feature-length extension of Nattiv’s Oscar-winning short film, also called Skin; the 2018 short played out like the most socially-conscious episode of The Twilight Zone anyone could imagine, as a backwoods racist received a taste of his own…
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is over-directed: The camera impersonates the POV of a pop fly ball, the images frequently are affected by superfluous slow-mo, and the score operates as if vying for this year’s Philip Glass Award for Cacophonous Sound That…
