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…
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…