Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has made, really, one kind of film for the majority of his career: decadent exercises in excess that observe the absurdity…
The perfect film for anyone who’s ever pondered the existence of a gift shop at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is…
Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes begins with a corker of an opening shot. Predominantly taking place at adjoining apartment complexes in Marseille separated by a courtyard, the…
Representing nearly a decade-long effort to bring the man who sexually assaulted her to justice, filmmaker Shiori Itō’s Black Box Diaries is primarily a firsthand…
The title character of Sean Baker’s Anora notably does not go by that name for most of the film, and appears uncomfortable when male…
On the Wikipedia page for the serial killer Rodney Alcala, there is a 145-word entry under the subheading “Dating Game appearance,” which recounts an…
One approaches the release of Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice with equal parts morbid curiosity and dread. Mired in what was almost certainly expected controversy…
In the annals of very real films that sound like they should be 30 Rock jokes, a feature-length documentary on the life of mega-producer and…
There are no shortage of hagiographies about Saturday Night Live (nee, Saturday Night), which is currently celebrating its 50th season on NBC, including countless books — most famously…
In 1982, Francis Ford Coppola briefly made dramatizing the works of young adult author S.E. Hinton his entire personality. Licking his wounds in the…
Almost as if it were made in response to John Krasinski’s IF, a saccharine fantasy about a motherless young girl who through magical contortions was…
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic…
There’s an innate novelty to Ron Howard directing a film like Eden, and it’s disingenuous not to mention it. The filmmaker has by all…
One of the more indelible sequences in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breakthrough documentary, The Act of Killing, features one of its subjects, the Indonesian paramilitary thug…
Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) The Last Showgirl announces its intentions and approach from its first frame. We open on a tight shot of the…
Two British women, one affluent and childless, the other impoverished and seven months pregnant with a brood already at home, reconnect after decades, having…
Both a post-#MeToo reckoning and a speculative account of the sort of behavior that could have transpired on billionaire Jeffrey Epstien’s island, Blink Twice…
Advanced mathematics on film is often treated as a gateway to mental illness (Pi) or espionage (The Imitation Game) or in some instances both…