The First Wave isn’t much more than an ornamental object, pointlessly self-assured in its distasteful aesthetic manipulations. The compartmentalization that contemporary documentary tends to engender…
Larrain is given massive assists courtesy of Stewart and Spencer’s A/V artists, but everyone is let down time and again by the film’s wildly unsubtle script.…
Titane admirably reconciles opposites and piles on texture and sensation, but ultimately reveals itself far too content to trade only in cliché. What is the…
Ailey ably captures and reflects its eponymous subject’s abiding vision: art’s capacity as a universal language. On December 4, 1988, dancer-choreographer Alvin Ailey received…
Pig isn’t the Nic Cage film you’re expecting — it’s better. It’s tough to recall a recent film — particularly outside the auteur context —…
Both politically and aesthetically, New Order is an ironic and troubling proclamation of solidarity with the old, regressive guard. The refinement of taste, an ongoing exploration…
With The Killing of Two Lovers, Robert Machoian constructs a difficult balance between simple-yet-impressive visual techniques and more frenzied audio compositions to drive an underwhelming…
Wheatley’s latest both builds and holds tension effectively, harnessing the director’s penchant for psychedelia and bruising horror to brutal effect. When Martin remarks at…
Gunda is an empty, exploitative aesthetic exercise that that has no ideas to speak of. If nothing else — and it truly offers little else…
Night of the Kings thrives on both its powerful sense of artifice and brutal reality. Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…