In his books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze draws a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image is concerned with linear…
In the opening of his 1994 novel A Frolic of His Own, William Gaddis writes: “Justice? – You get justice in the next world, in…
Phạm Thiên Ân’s road to filmmaking was circuitous. Born to a Catholic family in the rural mountains of Vietnam’s southern Lam Dong province, he spent…
“Like all history,” says an updated Damian (Jaquel Spivey) to the refreshed Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) and Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho), “this story is emotionally layered…
Michel Franco is a director who approaches unadorned tragedy with great familiarity; not as a shock or an inconvenience, but as the organizing principle of…
In Sean Price Williams’ directorial debut The Sweet East, Lillian (Talia Ryder) snaps to Ian (Jacob Elordi), “I believe that you’re more enamored in basking…
The future is forever in Divinity, Eddie Alcazar’s sci-fi experiment-cum-sophomore feature. Building on his first project’s purgatorial claustrophobia, and the technical feats of his 2021…
Implicit to the challenge “how do you want to live?” is the corollary: “how do you want to die?” This is the question at the…
Here’s a scenario: your day starts with a pregnancy scare. Then, you find your sister has run away from school, and on top of that…
Crime-thriller road films are a long-beloved American trademark, from Badlands to True Romance. In his new feature The Passenger, Carter Smith takes us on a…
Metanarratives have long-embodied the postmodern sensibility of ironic detachment by creating cultural products that are both self-acknowledging and effacing. They explore the very idea of…
In the midst of the World War Two, Australian journalist Paul Brickhill was bored by reality; to him, war fever was a case of major…
Hollywood action films have long abdicated the realm of gritty believability in favor of awe-inspiring excitement beyond the border of suspended belief. This has been…
It might seem trite to begin a film review with a quote, but we live in a world of clichés and can only outrun our…
There’s been a recent trend of revisiting the makings of great Hollywood classics, and with her new documentary — Desperate Souls, Dark City and the…
Srdan Keca’s observational documentary, Museum of the Revolution, begins in darkness. The viewer reads a series of words from 1961: “The purpose of the Museum…
The challenge of representing larger-than-life figures is that it can be hard to fit them in frame. But what about figures who abstain from the…
There is a literary sensibility to Juan Felipe Zuleta’s directorial debut, Unidentified Objects, that operates in the tradition of an invisible reality. A frenetic alien…
At the outset of White Balls on Walls, it’s so decreed: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam will remove the massive welcome at their entrance that reads…
Jamie Sisley’s directorial debut, Stay Awake, is an addiction story that situates its two primary characters outside the epicenter of the addiction — in its…
Joachim Lafosse’s The Restless begins with a stranding at sea. Damien (Damien Bonnard), a rising art star at the beginning of a manic episode, jumps…