Sharrock’s middlebrow approach and sitcom-ready style undermines much of Limbo’s potential power. About a decade ago, Serge Daney’s then recently-translated essay “The Tracking Shot in…
Author/chef/attorney/entrepreneur Eddie Huang adds a few more bullets to his CV as writer and director of coming-of-age drama Boogie, the tale of a Chinese-American high…
Land works best as a swooning mood piece, but lacks in thematic complexity and is too familiar by half. In Land — one of the two…
Promising Young Woman does its best to reshape the rape-revenge narrative into a novel form, but it ultimately fails to muster much ambiguity or thorniness. Heavy…
Kajillionaire is both July’s most restrained and most maudlin work to date There’s no denying that Miranda July’s particular idiosyncrasy shares DNA with a number of…
To understand the ostensible intent of Jon Stewart’s latest film, Irresistible, it’s best to begin at the end: “Money lived happily ever after…reveling in its…
Ever since Eve’s Bayou, Kasi Lemmons has foregrounded the need for black adolescents to realize the importance of their influence and existence in a society fundamentally unjust…
One of cinema’s most creatively fruitful collaborations is that of director Todd Haynes and cinematographer Ed Lachman. The films they’ve made together can superficially be…
Jim Jarmusch’s new horror-comedy, The Dead Don’t Die, is a missive from the other side. For one thing, it’s a zombie film in the tradition…
Iranian writer/director Asghar Farhadi understands the nature of secrets and their revelations, that they rarely signal resolution and instead work to further complicate situations. Whenever…
We’re a long ways away from when directors like Allan Dwan and Joseph H. Lewis could pack an absurd amount of plot into 70-minute features;…
The year’s second major film addressing the particular evil of church-sanctioned gay conversion therapy, Boy Erased (based on a memoir of the same name) was…
Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman tells the story of a black police officer in 1970s Colorado who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. But Lee is also telling…
Too often Hollywood wants to project the idea of motherhood as an innately beautiful thing, all soft lighting and angelic babies cooing at their beatific…
Tom Ford may have overburdened his first film, the Christopher Isherwood adaptation A Single Man, with quick-cut impressionistic montages and an overly polished look, but…
Cinema’s nominal purveyor of ruralism, most successfully of the Southern sort, Jeff Nichols is the de facto director to handle a story such as the one…
Having been put on the map by Coraline and Paranorman, stop-motion studio Laika returns with The Boxtrolls, a film which, while ostensibly possessing the same eye-catching visuals…
The American dissects the emotional enigmas of those working in two of the oldest professions — assassins and prostitutes, respectively. Its cryptic characters depend on…
The debate over the 1989 children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies seems like a cultural millennium ago, but that doesn’t mean the era ushered in…
In comparison to just about every other film Joel and Ethan Coen have directed in the last fifteen years or so, A Serious Man seems…
Adaptation is the medium of our time. For better or worse, appropriation has devolved from oxymoronic theories of postmodernism into a more practical mode of…