In all the consternation over the disappearance of the theatrical comedy, a trend hastened by post-Covid viewing habits that find comedies being largely relegated to…
In Michael Shanks’ body-horror-comedy Together, the recently-engaged but longtime-dating couple of Millie and Tim (played by real-life spouses and frequent creative collaborators Alison Brie and…
To coin an adage, directing a Stephen King adaptation is like getting a tattoo: it’s difficult to stop at one. The only thing harder to…
Hell of a Summer is an easy film to dislike. A summer camp slasher that unabashedly and quite winkingly wears the skin of its forebears…
In The Actor, memory pulls at the neck of Paul Cole (André Holland) like a diving tether that threatens to snap at every turn of…
In Oz Perkins’ The Monkey, a mechanical wind-up monkey that plays a drum (but don’t call it a toy) serves as a harbinger of death.…
The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended experiments…
Activism often dictates that form follows function, and that the message must come through at all costs — even if it should sacrifice the logic…
One of the more indelible sequences in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breakthrough documentary, The Act of Killing, features one of its subjects, the Indonesian paramilitary thug Anwar…
As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite possibly…
The title character of Sean Baker’s Anora notably does not go by that name for most of the film, and appears uncomfortable when male characters…
The first obvious parallel to Tilman Singer’s horror-thriller Cuckoo is The Shining. A family — Luis (Marton Csokas), the patriarch, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), his teenage…
Rarely has a NEON film so thoroughly lived up to the colorless and inert nature of the studio namesake as does Mothers’ Instinct, the directorial…
With little of the fanfare or cult of personality that has greeted the Peeles, Eggers, and Asters of the world, filmmaker Oz Perkins (I Am…
In his seminal 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, George Romero takes a few minutes to detail the final gasps of a television station trying…
One of the more adorable touches in Pablo Berger’s animated film Robot Dreams comes early on, when our lonely dog protagonist’s apartment is revealed to…
For expectant moms seeking the sort of potty humor that What To Expect When You’re Expecting, simply can’t deliver, Pamela Adlon’s debut feature film Babes…
In a 2020 essay by David Farrier, written at the very beginning of Covid lockdowns, the writer quotes Arundhati Roy, who calls the pandemic “a…
Jake Johnson has made a handsome career for himself playing on his everyman qualities. His big break as Nick Miller in New Girl (2011-2018) cemented…
More than almost any other director, the methods of Michael Mann’s filmmaking have always matched its meanings, and his characters are defined by their attempts…
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is no stranger to explorations and dramatizations of injustice in her work. Journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of…