Ever-present on those pesky “most disturbing movies” lists, Begotten almost became a victim of its own success. The film’s demiurge, God Killing Himself, adorns the…
Parsing the cinema’s relation to sound, Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “…the sound as well as visual elements of the image enter into internal relations which…
You’d think it would be impossible to create a new vision of death and the afterlife after more than a century of cinematic depictions. A…
The image of a lone warrior holding a child is baked into cinema’s fabric. From Lone Wolf and Cub to Hard Boiled, it’s iconography that…
I recently had the good fortune to screen Macedonian writer-director Leon Ristov’s short film Nikola, Nikola, which had its World Premiere in June at the…
One of the earliest scenes in supernatural horror movie Never After Dark is of everyday familial intimacy — as a young woman drives along a…
Leonardo Pirondi’s debut feature Tropicais Fractais isn’t your conventional sci-fi epic. There is a spaceship, a futuristic bio-dome-like built environment, AI-powered supercomputers, and the impending…
Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto forged his legendary cult status with ultraviolent, psychosexual Japanese films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tokyo Fist, and A Snake in…
“Intergenerational trauma” is a phrase that comes up often as a therapeutic buzzword, but less often is it talked about in systemic terms. When Colette…
A stunning bird’s-eye view of the Pacific Northwest’s sprawling vistas appears several times over in The Weight, Padraic McKinley’s tense, atmospheric Depression-era thriller; it’s the…
Powwow People, the new documentary from Ho-Chunk / Pechanga director Sky Hopinka is somewhat more straightforward than the experimental filmmaking that first gained Hopinka notoriety.…
Hope, South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s first foray into big-budget science fiction, is still very much a Na film. The hapless main characters, the thrilling,…
Looking back to the heyday of the New Queer Cinema movement that ruled the ’90s (the term itself was coined by film critic and scholar…
Since I first reviewed Chronovisor in my Rotterdam coverage this past February, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s feature debut has become a miniature sensation. Not…
There’s a category of media that takes juvenile gleefulness in tarnishing comforting and wholesome nostalgic imagery with violence, sex, and existential darkness. Early internet games…
After Latvia became the first Baltic country to win an Academy Award with Flow in 2025, Conan O’Brien joked, “Ball’s in your court, Estonia!” The…
The verdant hills of a resort’s private golf course serve as the backdrop for Rafael Manuel’s debut feature, Filipiñana; a strikingly picturesque setting that is…
You’d never know, just by looking at a Jesse V. Johnson picture, that he was working with much smaller budgets than the action you see…
Punk iconoclast Alex Cox isn’t going away quietly; in fact, he might not be going away at all — but let’s not get in the…
It’s no secret that Hollywood is currently trying to crack open the secret to Gen Z. What movies get them into a theater? What tests…
Shatara Michelle Ford is one of the unsung forces in American Independent cinema. Their debut feature, Test Pattern, was a quiet yet seismic announcement of…