C’mon C’mon is a distinctly inauthentic, contrived viewing experience more likely to have viewers chanting “go away, go away.” Next only to dead wives, doomed…
The Souvenir: Part II plays out largely as protracted epilogue, a fumbling, detached work that negates the first film’s powerful ending. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1778…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Peter Strickland is a stylistic maximalist, an homage specialist who makes Tarantino look like a film school pedant. Along with Helene Cattet & Bruno…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
We may have gotten to the point where not only is A24 curating its brand with obvious aesthetic guidelines, but also, we have fresh…
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…
Not quite the swing-for-the-fences sophomore audacity you might expect from the guy who made Hereditary — but certainly a film that never would have…
The Souvenir is that rare kind of great film, one that teaches you how to watch it as it goes on. There’s a constant…
“The closer you get, the further away it seems.” Claire Denis’s latest takes to space to articulate humans’ place in the cosmos, with a story…