The two sequences that form the beginning of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April set a mood of violent unease. We follow a faceless creature, vaguely humanoid…
In the near-decade since it came out, The Accountant has become a Dad Movie classic, beloved (some might say inexplicably) by anyone looking for…
After 2021’s El Planeta, Amalia Ulman ups the ante with her second feature, Magic Farm, in every conceivable way. Black-and-white cinematography here gives way…
The rapid ascension of Ryan Coogler as a pop-filmmaker of some stature has taken a somewhat counterintuitive route. After bursting onto the scene with…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid.…
I was not surprised that I was deeply charmed by young Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills To Pay, which screened at this year’s New…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy…
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is an impressionistic look at a small beach town in South Florida awaiting a large Hurricane to pass through.…
Mad Bills to Pay “The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad…
When last we left Alex Garland, he was busy parsing the American left/right divide and the moral responsibilities of war journalism in the phenomenally…
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…
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…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning…
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…
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick Filmmaker Pete Ohs’ working methods prioritize flexibility, openness, and spontaneity. As with all of his…
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…
“Everywhere animals disappear,” wrote art critic John Berger in his seminal book Why Look at Animals? Berger proposed an argument from capitalism, where the…
Miguel Gomes first began to build attention in the United States with his film Our Beloved Month of August in 2008. Since then, the…