Ailey ably captures and reflects its eponymous subject’s abiding vision: art’s capacity as a universal language. On December 4, 1988, dancer-choreographer Alvin Ailey received the Kennedy Center Honor in recognition of his contributions to modern dance throughout the second half of the 20th century.…
Pig isn’t the Nic Cage film you’re expecting — it’s better. It’s tough to recall a recent film — particularly outside the auteur context — that announces itself with as much clarity as Pig. The film stars Nicolas Cage as a curmudgeonly hermit on the…
Both politically and aesthetically, New Order is an ironic and troubling proclamation of solidarity with the old, regressive guard. The refinement of taste, an ongoing exploration of one’s personal experience, while all well and good, always runs the risk of becoming solipsistic, of neglecting the areas…
With The Killing of Two Lovers, Robert Machoian constructs a difficult balance between simple-yet-impressive visual techniques and more frenzied audio compositions to drive an underwhelming narrative. Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers begins with a close-up of David’s (Clayne Crawford) face. His stern and…
Wheatley’s latest both builds and holds tension effectively, harnessing the director’s penchant for psychedelia and bruising horror to brutal effect. When Martin remarks at the wonder of being out of the house for the first time in four months, Alma, his guide into the…
Gunda is an empty, exploitative aesthetic exercise that that has no ideas to speak of. If nothing else — and it truly offers little else — Viktor Kosakovskiy’s Gunda serves as a handy catalogue of contemporary film-festival affectation. Although it nominally concerns the lives of…
Night of the Kings thrives on both its powerful sense of artifice and brutal reality. Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature, whose structural integrity depends upon a viewer’s willingness to accept its dramatic reflexivity. A mythopoetic work invoking the oral…
Ammonite struggles to summon the visceral potency or emotional depth needed to tell its story. Three years on from Francis Lee’s terrific gay drama, God’s Own Country, and the director has moved on from the romantic union of two lusty male farmers to a 19th-century…
Possessor is an artfully ultra-violent and surprisingly empathetic mash-up of futuristic and retro genre influences. In Brandon Cronenberg’s debut film Antiviral, there’s a line of dialogue that sticks out as a kind of poetic koan to his sensibility; a salesman specializing in pushing celebrities’ viral contagions…
She Dies Tomorrow is a fever-dreamy reflection of modern existential anxieties. Rodney Ascher’s 2015 documentary The Nightmare follows multiple subjects that have experienced bouts of sleep paralysis, a real phenomenon involving the sensation of being lucid but with an inability to speak or move. It’s not…
