In this dispatch: Our Effed Up World…
Over 40 years and as many movies into his career, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has finally made his first samurai film. Maybe it was the looming shadow…
Hanna Bergholm’s second feature has had two lives. At its world premiere in the Berlinale competition, Nightborn was generally considered a low point in an…
A deadly heatwave stretches across Paris; on TV, civilians in the West Bank and Beirut speak out against fatal Israeli bombings; and an aging gay…
For Steven Spielberg, the cinema is a rebuilding, again and again, of the childhood bedroom. There is some portion of prelapsarian bliss involved: a desperate,…
When you first see Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that became a local New York City legend, appear on a hotel sidewalk, you immediately comprehend his…
In February 2023, when the world was shaking off COVID-induced anxiety around confined spaces and returning to schools, offices, and restaurants in droves, New Yorkers…
There’s a lot to take from A Sad and Beautiful World, the feature debut from documentarian Cyris Aris, ostensibly a straight-faced drama of love in…
Just as Saltburn cemented the shtick of class satire onto its eye-watering Pinterest moodboards, Karim Aïnouz’s curiously engaging take on the hollow sex lives of…
Three years ago, I wrote an essay arguing Allen Fong’s Ah Ying (1983) paints a more realistic picture of 1980s Hong Kong than Wong Kar-wai’s…
In this dispatch: Kinki, Cold War…
Nicolas Winding Refn resists containment. His earliest films (the Pusher [1996-2005] trilogy and Bleeder [1999]) channel a forceful neo-realist intensity, while his subsequent works venture…
Through a career of empathetic, patient character studies, Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda has developed many running fascinations. Gaps in families, how we fill those, and…
If you have ever had a chance to see Hadestown live, you won’t wonder at its success, running on Broadway for seven years now despite…
Perhaps the funniest moment in The Dink comes when Dusty (Jake Johnson) aka the Hammer, watches The Graduate with Candace (Mary Steenburgen), not realizing it’s…
Billionaires are a funny breed. A hardworking and often altruistic bunch, they nevertheless carry the scarlet letter of corruption wherever they go: they may do…
The actor Alan Ritchson is a little bit of an anomaly as far as modern leading men go. Best known for playing the title role…
Premiering all the way back during 2024’s festival season, Lorena Alvarado’s Lost Chapters has been a film I’d been looking forward to for quite some…
Based on its tepid reception in Cannes earlier this year, one might reasonably expect Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film Sheep in the Box to be a…
In this dispatch: Turgaud…
The patient sensibilities of Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing wouldn’t normally suggest a paranoid political thriller. And yet, his debut feature, with long takes evoking…