Bergman Island is an intentionally ephemeral, frictionless bit of meta-fiction, conceptually justifiable but all the more frustrating for it. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally, an insular film. Set almost entirely on the island of Fårö, where the legendary Swedish filmmaker lived and shot…
The Nowhere Inn smartly softens its meta conceit with some winking humor, but doesn’t interrogate any of its ideas or rise above mere brand management. Returning to the scene of the crime, Annie Clark (who performs as St. Vincent, important distinction here) has reteamed with…
Dating abd New York offers sporadic pleasures, but can’t shake loose its obvious cribbing of familiar cinematic influences. Dating and New York, Jonah Feingold’s feature debut after working in shorts and television for the past decade, is a film built from the scraps of…
Some pacing issues occasionally upset We Need to Do Something‘s otherwise effective tone, but it remains a solid, low-ceiling genre exercise. We Need to Do Something is both the title of the new film by Sean King O’Grady as well as the increasingly frantic…
John and the Hole mistakes ambiguity for depth at every opportunity, forgoing actual psychological probing in favor of shallow posturing. Tapped by Cannes for its theoretical 2020 slate, John and the Hole carried a bit more intrigue than most films heading into Sundance ’21. This…
Enemies of the State fails to probe deeply, content with its story’s sensational surface at the expense of more meaningful study. Produced by genius documentarian and foremost interviewer of American war criminals, Errol Morris, Sonia Kennebeck’s Enemies of the State comes marked with a certain…
Werewolves Within doesn’t deliver many scares, but it hits an amusing, breezy target that too few horror-comedies manage. Finn (Sam Richardson) is the new forest ranger in the little town of Beaverfield, which, as friendly (and gossipy) mail carrier Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) tells him,…
Holler stumbles a bit on the way to its ending, but its strength of direction, character, and milieu make for an often thrilling bit of industrial indie cinema. There’s a scene about halfway through Nicole Riegel’s debut feature Holler where Ruth (Jessica Barden) and her…
In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often plays a crucial role. Whether it’s the seaside (in The State I Am In, Jerichow and Barbara), lakes and…
The Dry perhaps ends too tidily, but it remains a welcomingly straightforward and visceral thriller that plays fair with its audience. Robert Connolly’s The Dry begins with aerial shots of a barren, wasted landscape, rows upon rows of dead farmland stretching across the horizon. The jagged…
