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…
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…
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…
Body doubles and deception have always been the fertile staples of romantic comedy — look no further than Shakespeare, who imbued such courtly antics…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
Fire of Love is an gorgeous visual document that is somewhat undermined by its inorganic and distracting voiceover work. Despite boasting a title that…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Erudite and playful and moving, The Worst Person in the World is brimming with ideas and feeling, and executed with the touch of a master storyteller.…