In The Actor, memory pulls at the neck of Paul Cole (André Holland) like a diving tether that threatens to snap at every turn…
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…
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…
Activism often dictates that form follows function, and that the message must come through at all costs — even if it should sacrifice the…
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…
As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite…
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…
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…
Rarely has a NEON film so thoroughly lived up to the colorless and inert nature of the studio namesake as does Mothers’ Instinct, the…
With little of the fanfare or cult of personality that has greeted the Peeles, Eggers, and Asters of the world, filmmaker Oz Perkins (I…
In his seminal 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, George Romero takes a few minutes to detail the final gasps of a television station…
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…
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…
In a 2020 essay by David Farrier, written at the very beginning of Covid lockdowns, the writer quotes Arundhati Roy, who calls the pandemic…
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)…
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…
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…
Alice Rohrwacher’s cinema occupies a unique place in the festival landscape, part pleasingly familiar and part bracingly daring, especially in the context of her…