“Trauma horror,” or “grief horror,” has become so ubiquitous that the subgenre has infiltrated even the most quotidian commercial horror films; it seems that the…
A cascading slant of coastal daylight betrays the futile dangers of vacation time in Durga Chew-Bose’s sensual, stilling, and elegiac rendition of Françoise Sagan’s 1954…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a…
A snakeskin tube top and cowboy hat. A belt worn on a bare midriff, above the belly button. And, of course, the famous white tutu.…
Any movie that features a theater critic as a main character invites more intentional criticism from even lay viewers through the mere recognition that the…
Queen Elizabeth II’s love of horses is well known. She even made the trek to Kentucky five separate times during her reign to visit various…
Late in Queendom, the queer Russian performance artist Gena Marvin (alternately styled as Jenna Marvin) struts during a go-see where a fashion designer calls her…
In her 1977 essay collection On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that the abundance of photographic images in our culture had begun to engender “a chronic…
Following nearly three years of an ongoing pandemic, everyone has a new understanding of isolation. After varying degrees of social distancing regulations and masking recommendations,…
It’s become a cliche to point out the cliche of the arthouse festival darling that amounts to essentially two hours of a marginalized person getting…
The camera’s all-encompassing eye, famously termed the “kino-eye” by Russian filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov, has always been capable of revealing the mysterious and hidden.…
Though the blues and jazz and bluegrass and country and frankly the whole catalogue of American music comes from the American South, the region’s role…
At first glance, there may be nothing necessarily wrong with Antoine Barraud’s third feature film, Madeleine Collins; on the contrary, it quickly evokes a certain…
When talking about Mouchette, his acclaimed 1967 drama, Robert Bresson said that the put-upon titular character “offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found…
Detrimental is the perspective mired in solipsism, where the world that surrounds a character exists only to serve their compulsions. What is disclosed through this…
Ali and Ava is a more formally restrained work for Barnard, but one imbued with limitless compassion and hardscrabble authenticity. Clio Barnard’s 2010 debut film…
Accepted doesn’t always handle its myriad threads with equal deftness, but the film is movingly carried through on the strength of its individual stories and…
My Donkey, My Lover & I might trade too liberally in cliché, but its escapist texture, palpable charm, and refusal to give in to sexist…
Mau delivers only celebratory mythos and lore where a thornier portrait of its subject could have built something far more meaningful. In this era of virtually…
Hello, Bookstore is soothing, cozy documentary but one entirely devoid of stakes or storytelling thrust. Hello, Bookstore opens with footage shot in the early weeks of…
Dear Mr. Brody is powerful in spurts and conceived of in fascinating terms, but Maitland struggles to reconcile his disparate threads into a cohesive whole. Keith…