Larry Fessenden’s movies run amok with monsters. There’s the obvious, familiar monster: the vampire (as seen in 1997’s Habit), Frankenstein’s monster (as seen in 2019’s…
For a while you could go to the Under Armour “brand house” on “The Baltimore Peninsula” and buy a shirt that said “Maryland Tough, Baltimore…
Parker Tyler, eclectic film critic and champion of the early American avant-garde cinema, wrote in Underground Film, his critical history of the movement published in…
The sun shines through a windshield. We see a blue sky speckled with blinding white clouds. If heaven exists, and it’s up there, it doesn’t…
Across 30 years and seven films, Lee Chang-dong has told stories about a diverse array of people, from the gangsters in Green Fish (1997), to…
Two years after announcing himself to the film world with Green Fish, a noir that used the genre’s bleak markers to scaffold the erasure of…
A friend once admitted to having consumed Wonka (2023) on his cellphone mid-flight, in 10-minute increments between naps, “the way Scorsese intended.” The admission is,…
MoMA’s screening series “Long Live the Underground!” is a celebration in honor of two esteemed New York institutions. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, founded in 1961, was…
A young woman walks through a field of white flowers, suspended for a moment with neither origin nor destination, seemingly fallen to earth in Carlos…
Under the aegis of the recently formed specialty label Clockwork, Warner Bros. Pictures is finally releasing a full restoration of Ken Russell’s The Devils in…
The thematic programs in MoMA’s retrospective commemorating the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Millennium Film Workshop are generally grouped around certain political (“Make Love Not War”), poetic…
Fourteen years ago, Dan Sallitt burst into the indie film scene with his transgressive, funny, and ultimately sweet, The Unspeakable Act. It wasn’t Sallitt’s first…
Ever-present on those pesky “most disturbing movies” lists, Begotten almost became a victim of its own success. The film’s demiurge, God Killing Himself, adorns the…
The United States of America is a drag queen. Drunk, dressed in her shiniest finery, and thickly rouged, the American empire according to Jack Smith…
My prewar apartment building in Queens has a mind of its own when it comes to temperature regulation. As another nor’easter batters the city, you…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
I recently had the good fortune to screen Macedonian writer-director Leon Ristov’s short film Nikola, Nikola, which had its World Premiere in June at the…
Leonardo Pirondi’s debut feature Tropicais Fractais isn’t your conventional sci-fi epic. There is a spaceship, a futuristic bio-dome-like built environment, AI-powered supercomputers, and the impending…
“Intergenerational trauma” is a phrase that comes up often as a therapeutic buzzword, but less often is it talked about in systemic terms. When Colette…
There is a striking early scene with an unknown woman that cuts deep into the sensory motif embedded in the title of May el-Toukhy’s latest…
In 2025, among the best films of the year, at least according to this very outlet, was Lav Diaz’s Magellan. That work concluded along the…