Dick Johnson is Dead forgoes potentially rich avenues of more universal concern, but remains a heartfelt portrait and preservation of the filmmaker’s father. Documentarian Kirsten…
The Forty-Year-Old Version deploys a charming lead but never manages to coalesce its many and varied influences. Within the relative glut of 21st-century hip hop cinema,…
Late career Adam Sandler thrives within Netflix’s low stakes, and Hubie Halloween is his most buoyant effort yet. For the better part of a decade, most highbrow…
Enola Holmes is a cartoon. Or perhaps the problem is that it should have been. The film follows the title character (played by Stranger Things’…
The Devil All the Time abandons any meaningful Southern Gothic tradition or thematic complexity in favor of base misery. Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time is…
The Paramedic is the gleeful, glorious pulp-trash the world needs right now. New Spanish-language thriller The Paramedic wastes no time in establishing its title character, Angel (Mario…
Residue is a singular, important achievement, a work of shattering beauty and necessary discourse. Director Merawi Gerima was born into an impressive cinematic lineage. His father…
Cuties is an impressive, complex coming-of-age narrative and a profound refutation of the nonsensical controversy that has arisen around it. The hysteria surrounding Maïmouna Doucouré’s…
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a masterful and surprising adaptation from Charlie Kaufman, a work of towering humanism braced by an exquisitely disorienting aesthetic.…
Project Power keeps the maniac Neveldine/Taylor aesthetic alive and is another welcome Netflix foray into small-scale superhero entries. There’s a new designer drug on the streets…
The Old Guard navigates familiar genre terrain but with enough punch to put the hetero white male actioner ethos on notice. Every big-budget action flick…
There is more than a bit of irony to be found in the fact that the new Will Ferrell/Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story…
Olivier Assayas produced a stunningly idiosyncratic series of works in the 2010s, even by his typically eclectic standards. From the mammoth Carlos to the autobiographical Something in…
Spike Lee’s newest joint, Da 5 Bloods, makes perfectly clear its influences when, within the first five minutes, the camera pans out from a giant…
Since being plucked from relative obscurity by uber-producer Kevin Feige, the Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony, have become two of the most commercially successful directors…
Borrowing from J.G. Ballard’s metaphorical scaffolding — as outlined in the author’s social-horror novel, High-Rise (and its mismanaged film adaptation) — Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s conceptually similar,…
Another portrait of trauma, Nora Fingesheidt’s debut feature revolves around the social condition indicated by its title: Systemsprenger, or System Crasher. The film follows problem…
Mati Diop’s debut feature Atlantics utilizes multiple narrative modes: social-realist drama, love story, detective procedural, ghost story, supernatural possession tale. And if the seams between these…
Noah Baumbach doesn’t like risk. Even when his films are impressive — and they often are — their formal parameters remain fairly limited. His collaborations…
Religious resentment dominates the order of service in Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes, an adaptation of acclaimed screenwriter Anthony McCarten’s play about the unexpected resignation of…
For some inexplicable reason, Netflix seems to have set its sights on reviving the early-to- mid 90’s boom of erotic thrillers, old-fashioned melodramas mixed with…