Wonders in the Suburbans is an unwieldy affair, taking supposedly comedic pot-shots at any number of targets without any clear vision. Jeanne Balibar’s brand of idiosyncrasy — most recently and prominently displayed in Mathieu Amalric’s Barbara — curdles with her solo directorial debut, Wonders in…
Dolan’s latest intrigues in deviating from the director’s familiar mode, but its busyness never fully distills into any cogent statement. Matthias & Maxime, the 2019 Cannes competition nominee and most recent film of Canadian actor-director-producer-writer-editor Xavier Dolan, will be familiar fare to those who…
Taking as his subject the Japanese company Family Romance LLC, director Werner Herzog returns to offer a work widely labelled as ‘strange’ by the media that renders the line between real and artificial indistinct. Titled as it is — Family Romance LLC, after the company — the film plays out…
The first feature-length work from avant-garde filmmaker/animator/composer Jodie Mack defies easy categorization. The Grand Bizarre is a sort of musical (like her Yard Work Is Hard Work and Dusty Stacks of Mom) in that Mack’s rhythmic editing is synchronized with her original synth-pop score,…
Set in the remote valley of Qadishi, in Northern Lebanon, Abbas Fahdel’s Yara is a limited, if verdant vision of quotidian life. Centered on an orphaned teen girl (Michelle Wehbe) — the title character — who lives with her grandmother, the film observes a…
The latest film from Filipino director Lav Diaz to make it to US streaming services is the almost four-hour long, politically charged, a cappella musical Season of the Devil — a film that is, per the director himself, “about motherfuckers like Donald Trump.” A…
If Gerardo Naranjo hadn’t already taken the title I’m Gonna Explode for his 2008 portrait of adolescent rebellion, it would have made a fitting option for Permanent Green Light, the sophomore feature from co-directors Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. Then again, perhaps that would…
Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (which first premiered in 2016, but is only now getting a release Stateside this year, thanks to the streaming platform Mubi) is a descent into the vagaries of national identity, history, and revolution as seen through…
It’s probably safe to say that Sylvia Chang‘s Love Education is the kind of film that is impossible to get made in America at this point in time. A quiet, patiently observed slice-of-life drama just isn’t in the works from US studios; they would turn this…
Agniszka Smoczynska’s The Lure was not, by most metrics, a hit, but it wasn’t a failure either; it made a small amount of money in its theatrical run, garnered positive critical notices, and eventually found its way to a place in the Criterion Collection’s catalog.…
