Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against…
You ready? Yeah, boot it. Strange Days should have launched Kathryn Bigelow’s career into the stratosphere. Having conquered land, sea, and air in 1991’s Point…
Needless to say, deliberately titling your film Bone Lake will automatically trigger suggestive connotations about the film’s potential content. Will the feature consist of a…
Critiquing the directorial efforts of well-known actors is trickier than it seems. For example, it’s impossible to ignore, especially at a festival as prestigious and…
Is This Thing On? Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured…
The ceiling caves in at the outset of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the Rose Byrne-starring second feature from Mary Bronstein, her first…
For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how so few contemporary filmmakers…
Vijay Sethupathi is certainly the most versatile and interesting, not to mention basely pleasurable, “superstar” still kicking in the world cinema. His early performances for…
In his 1998 monograph on gay male identification with the Broadway musical, Place for Us: Essay on the American Musical, D.A. Miller identifies the archetypal…
Göran Olsson’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 is a remarkable documentary, if not purely for its access to decades worth of newsreels, interviews, and…
Following the critical success of 2018’s The Wolf House, directoral duo Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña have returned with The Hyperboreans, a papier-mâché melange of…
In retrospect, maybe it doesn’t seem all that weird that 1982’s TRON has turned into a nostalgia-coated franchise with a lot of barely-baked ideas about…
Raoul Peck’s latest documentary certainly has timeliness going for it. There is of course a rise of authoritarianism around the world, a set of schemes…
No Other Choice “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Frederic Jameson No one seems to enjoy…
Blue Moon Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of…
Of Kelly Reichardt’s many talents behind the camera, historically, she is not a filmmaker you would refer to as “a trickster” — there is little…
Most Septembers are a scramble for the next big hit, and there seem to be at least a few for each day of each fall…
First, on griots: these were the African Mande people’s historians, genealogists, poets, and court jesters. They were the official storytellers, and, as writers of their…
The first idea that can be discarded with regard to Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, the acclaimed 1985 film centered on the…
Dracula Radu Jude is aiming for nothing less than the grand finale of vampire movies with his Dracula, and as a Romanian, why shouldn’t he…
How refreshing it is to see a debut film. Movies by established directors, even directors one likes, carry the burden of expectation. “Every movie is…