In recalibrating its source material, The Green Knight often proves compelling, but it doesn’t always convince as a fully liberated work. “I see legends,” Gawain (Dev Patel) is prompted to say as he observes the commencement of King Arthur’s Christmas banquet. Too obviously, he wants…
Unlike recent duds Mainstream and PVT Chat, Zola is a film that cuttingly, brutally understands what it is to be Extremely Online. No film better encapsulates the callous ferocity of our strikingly virtual and sleekly hyper-real era than one conceived within its very nethers. This carnal metaphor…
Saint Maud is another A24 exercise in elevated, modulated horror but is fairly absent of anything beyond empty, artful pretense. It’s been a long journey to the screen for Rose Glass’ Saint Maud. After premiering at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, Saint Maud has…
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,…
