We have so many World War II-era films and biographical films of varying quality that for a new one to feel properly worthwhile it…
It’s incredibly rare in our super-connected, social media-fueled media ecosystem for a new film to arrive with no notice, no awareness of which to…
Maybe more than any of its brethren of subgenre monsters, the exorcism film The Exorcist (1973) looms large over its brood of descendants. There…
In the opening moments of Firebrand, we meet Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), a fervent reformer preaching against the Church of England during King Henry…
Baseball and film aren’t so different. Both are a national pastime, and both traditionally enforce a sort of spiritual mindfulness that is otherwise associated…
In light of the ongoing SAG strikes, this year’s TIFF featured a bevy of actor-directors, (generationally) ranging from Michael Keaton to Finn Wolfhard —…
It’s been an extremely productive year for director Jesse V. Johnson. Our premier DTV auteur has churned out three films in the last 13…
The newest and biggest film of Maïwenn’s directorial career, Jeanne du Barry, a film whose subject is the eponymously named final mistress to Louis…
At first blush (and the next few, for that matter), actress Brittany Snow’s directorial debut, Parachute, which premiered in the Narrative Feature Competition at…
At the height of the pandemic, one of the more uplifting trends on social media were videos of people living in cities, clanging pots…
Writing on the difficulties of representing addiction, Leslie Jamison notes that the process of sobriety is seen as a “tedious addendum” to the riveting…
It wouldn’t be unfair to observe that plenty of indie films today seem more concerned with the representative modes of filmmaking and storytelling than…
More exasperating than the woebegone premise of Olivia West Lloyd’s feature debut is the experience of actually watching it all unfold. The film limps…
It’s common nowadays to praise “late style,” those works by great auteurs that find aged artists working familiar ground and exploring their obsessions with…
Rebecca Miller’s films often find their core humanity in their characters’ dysfunction: motional tumult, isolation and enmeshment, neuroses and quirky pathologies, all swirling in…
For centuries, humanity has found ways to outsource certain aspects of childbirth, but these advances were mostly limited to wet nurses, surrogate pregnancies, and,…
Across diverse forms of media, artists have devised various modes of depicting oppression. Watching Clement Virgo’s stirring feature Brother, it’s the smallness of the…
It might seem trite to begin a film review with a quote, but we live in a world of clichés and can only outrun…