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…
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 relatively…
Stop me if this synopsis sounds familiar: A mousy young woman from an outlandishly dysfunctional family finally snaps and unleashes vengeance upon her small New…
Writing in 1924, the rhetorician and literary critic I.A. Richards remarked, in his Principles of Literary Criticism, on the “futility of all argumentation that precedes…
Set almost entirely in and around a grimy, uninviting tavern in the Australian outback, Kitty Green’s follow-up to 2019’s The Assistant, The Royal Hotel, serves as an expansion of that film’s themes of…
Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside begins on an appropriately ominous note; the camera prowls down a dark hallway, blood-splattered on walls and bodies lying on…
Body doubles and deception have always been the fertile staples of romantic comedy — look no further than Shakespeare, who imbued such courtly antics with…
“Adapted” from Andreas Malm’s 2021 climate change manifesto of the same name, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline shoots out of the gate…
In Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, the unnamed protagonist (Mary Woodvine, in a role mysteriously dubbed “The Volunteer”) sets out on a mundane, quietly transfixing routine.…
Though still relatively early in his career, initial indications are that arterial spray and pulverized bones are to Brandon Cronenberg’s filmography what unnatural orifices are…
On the occasion of him winning the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for his film Shoplifters, I called Hirokazu Kore-eda “the Ron…
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed proceeds in such awe of its subject that it strips the film of any thorniness that the material demands. All…
Triangle of Sadness vacillates between slight but sly commentary and outright gaudiness, but an enigmatic, delightfully bathetic ending ushers Östlund’s film out on a high note.…
Moonage Daydream is a joyous, eccentric, and experimental documentary that should please Bowie fanatics, glam rock die-hards, and adventurous cinephiles in equal measure. If one were…
Fire of Love is an gorgeous visual document that is somewhat undermined by its inorganic and distracting voiceover work. Despite boasting a title that seems…
Beba is a uniquely fascinating or formally gorgeous mining of personal history, one that fully immerses viewers into its subject’s headspace. “You are now entering…
Crimes of the Future is a fascinating, ambitious project from Cronenberg, who readily sources his own career-long preoccupations in the creation of something that feels…
In ultimately providing too many answers to its excessive plotting, A Chiara extinguishes some of its more troubling and intriguing possibilities. A gangster film from the…
Pleasure isn’t the first film to attack the intersection of capitalism, misogyny, and exploitation endemic to the porn industry, but it does so with style…
Petite Maman is both Sciamma’s most intimate and epic work, a gently profound fable about youth’s uneasy passage into adulthood. Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed…