There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong Kong,…
It’s always a strange experience when a self-consciously campy horror film pulls out something genuinely emotional, if only for about a minute. Christopher Landon’s Drop…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning call…
A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down…
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick Filmmaker Pete Ohs’ working methods prioritize flexibility, openness, and spontaneity. As with all of his features…
Her mother’s letters come like intercepted radio transmissions, or echoes of prayers. In this state of relentless observation, pure receptivity, how could she not hear…
“Everywhere animals disappear,” wrote art critic John Berger in his seminal book Why Look at Animals? Berger proposed an argument from capitalism, where the industrialized…
Miguel Gomes first began to build attention in the United States with his film Our Beloved Month of August in 2008. Since then, the Portuguese…
Film has always stood in tense relation to history: it both creates and consumes it. Often, it does both simultaneously. Steve Erickson’s book Days Between…
Little Boy In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I…
“Something that starts soon and looks good.” “Okay, so what’s the plot?” Anybody who has ever recommended any work of fiction has surely been hit…
“Eat the rich” satires didn’t start under Trump, but it certainly feels like they’re accelerating of late. We’re less than a month removed from the…
It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe a…
Since the release of his first short film, Heroes Never Die, 35 years ago, Alain Guiraudie has gradually built a reputation as one of world…
As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap hotel…
Nominated for five Academy Awards, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance has been one of the most talked about movies of the past year. Since its premiere…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences,…
Desert of Namibia At first, Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what this writer is calling Millennium Mambo-core, after…
Since his emergence on the periphery of the “New French Extremity” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bruno Dumont has continued to carve out…
You could argue that it’s extremely ironic that The Electric State, an absolutely dismal movie about humanity learning to love corporate-branded A.I. robots rising up…
Independent American filmmaking in the 1970s features many showcases of distinctive actor-director relationships. One of them: Joan Micklin Silver and her many great actors, including…