s1e1 – “Pilot” I have been thinking about Robin Wood and playing foxtail in a front yard that smelled like Sugar Maple leaves and garage…
With his breakout directorial feature Ex Machina, Alex Garland reduced a story that demanded to question the relationship between a body and a soul down…
“Toys are too preoccupied with fun,” Alejandro (Julio Torres) declares in a cover letter to Hasbro during the opening of Torres’ debut feature film Problemista.…
Arriving less than a month after the release of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s queer crime-comedy Drive-Away Dolls, Love Lies Bleeding, from British filmmaker Rose Glass, signals…
The abstraction of narrative devices to facilitate a certain tenor has lent itself, among certain circles, to the term “tone poetry.” While cinema has remained…
Discussing Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, a dramatization of the lives of the Von Erich clan whose importance to professional wrestling has stretched across decades and multiple generations, in any great…
The issue at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is one of the oldest in the cinema: how does one represent the…
Back in the mid-2000s, there was an Internet phenomenon called “Ever Dream This Man?” in which thousands of strangers around the globe claimed to collectively…
Sofia Coppola has been chronicling the private spaces and inner lives of young women for her entire career and her new film Priscilla — an…
There’s an undeniable novelty that introduces Thomas Hardiman’s directorial debut, Medusa Deluxe. On its surface, the film promises to be a lively, twisty — quite…
No doubt this has been said elsewhere already, but the most effective horror traffics in an unreality that’s very much tethered to our real world.…
Savanah Leaf’s debut Earth Mama treats the viewer to a tender, moving portrait of a complicated Black woman. Leaf establishes the stakes early on: Gia…
With Past Lives, director Celine Song has a fine story on her hands — and she knows it. A decade after immigrating with her family…
Even within the world of American independent filmmaking, there’s something endearingly out-of-step about the films of Nicole Holofcener. Warm and chatty when angst and calling…
Joaquin Phoenix’s first scene in Beau Is Afraid takes place in his therapist’s office, setting the story in motion while also presenting a roadmap of…
Despite the steady repetition of themes that define Kelly Reichardt’s filmography (alienation, class, gender, the American West), her output has remained surprisingly unpredictable moving from…
Running through a field of brightly colored flowers might seem an awfully clichéd image of childhood innocence, but there is some hope that Lukas Dhont’s…
Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale boasts an interest back-to-his-roots quality, but also affirms all of the director’s worst tendencies. Although The Whale is an adaptation of the…
In pushing viewers past the limits of reality, The Eternal Daughter more vividly than ever paints the loss and alienation undergirding Hogg’s cinema. “No live…
Causeway is a sturdy enough film with fine anchoring performances, but it doesn’t otherwise boast much in the way of substance. It’s been some time since…
Aftersun evokes the rending nostalgia of Terence Davies, lensing a father-daughter story through quiet, melancholic remembrance. Memories are fragile; they weather with time, fray around the…