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…
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…
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Chinonye Chukwu’s grim death row drama Clemency begins with a lethal injection gone wrong, which results in a prisoner experiencing an especially agonizing end. Dealing with the controversial issue of capital punishment, still…
More sentient discourse than credible drama, Julius Onah’s Luce frankensteins together a collection of button-pushers: issues of race, class, privilege, elitism, tokenism, essentialism, free will, mental health, radical ideologies, sexual assault, social media’s distortions, police brutality, and on and on. One could charitably call…
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s documentary Honeyland opens with the image of a yellow-frocked figure, indistinct, walking a notched path that winds through a green sea of grass. It’s an aerial shot, and it basks in a vision of spring-colored tranquility. But this is almost immediately upset with…
Vox Lux, the second film from actor-turned-director Brady Corbet (after 2016’s The Childhood of a Leader), scans as a fruitless and embittered attack on pop celebrity, complete with familiar assertions that our collective degradation of cultural mores is bound to lead to the insidious…
Aaron Katz’s glossy, very surface-conscious mystery opens in high style with an upside-down shot of twilit palm trees, cool vaporwave beats easing the transition to additional moody images of crepuscular Los Angeles environs (Andrew Reed’s the DP, Keegan DeWitt did the music). While 2014’s…
Eliza Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love, was a promising, if familiar Brooklyn-set tale of a teenage girl’s burgeoning sexuality. With, Beach Rats, Hittman revisits the same setting, but with the focus now on a teenage boy’s nascent queer exploration. When the film…
