Peter Strickland is a stylistic maximalist, an homage specialist who makes Tarantino look like a film school pedant. Along with Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 made…
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 tension…
“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 that…
Under the Silver Lake, the third feature from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, is the kind of ambitious, self-indulgent project destined to appeal only to a…
If nothing else, Gaspar Noe’s Climax suggests that, should someone ever decide to revive the Step Up franchise, Noe might be a name producers could consider.…
Sometimes the determination between an actor’s successful and unsuccessful work comes down to context, like the ensemble of actors surrounding them, and sometimes it’s about the…
No other company right now is playing the is-it-or-isn’t-is-a-horror-film game quite like A24. Blumhouse has their straightforward genre thrills down pat, with the occasional Purge film to expand their…
Above all else, Andrew Haigh has proven himself a deeply empathic artist; whether tackling 21st century queer identity (Looking, Weekend) or the devolution of a decades-long relationship…
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut (she co-directed 2008’s Nights and Weekends with Joe Swanberg), demonstrates a casual mastery of filmmaking, intuitively changing emotional registers—something essential to the teenage…
For anyone lamenting the political reticence of much of American independent filmmaking, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project—the consensus favorite of this year’s Directors’ Fortnight Program…
Admirers of David Lowery’s third feature (and second with stars Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, after 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) have and will point…
Delivering as both a remarkable exercise in sensuousness and a wholly affecting look at suffocated identity, Barry Jenkins’s second film is one of remarkable intimacy,…
At the start of American Honey, Jake and Star, its two lead characters (played by Shia LeBeouf and newcomer Sasha Lane, respectively) meet and somehow…
Robert Eggers’s debut film arrives prepackaged with the usual hype garnered by a Sundance homerun. Now a year removed from that successful premiere, however, assessments of The Witch have…