Speak No Evil is a grueling experience in the best possible sense, punctuating by a giddily mean-spirited and pitch-perfect ending. Like an unholy amalgamation of Michael…
Despite his reputation as a mainstream hit-maker, Zemeckis has always had a wildly idiosyncratic relationship to both genre and film history. Not as obsessed with…
After nearly a decade of directing expensive mo-cap animated films to variable box-office returns, the 2010s found Robert Zemeckis at a crossroads. The massive critical…
Saloum is an absolute blast, packed with pleasant genre surprises and announcing a major new filmmaker in Jean Luc Herbulot. Part of the joy of…
Tin Can is the best kind of sci-fi, an equal mix of weirdo ideas and careful world-building that leads viewers to a genuinely unsettling conclusion.…
Samaritan is a shallow, abysmally paced actioner that fails to deliver any impressive action. A drab, joyless affair, the new Sylvester Stallone vehicle Samaritan finds…
The Legend of Molly Johnson can skew a bit too on-the-nose at times, but it remains a bold, uncompromising work and the best kind of revisionist…
Early on in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s new film Matter Out of Place, a man investigating an unearthed landfill site utters the phrase “out of sight, out…
Short films are particularly difficult to finesse into satisfying wholes. Often fashioned as simple calling cards, an attempt to show off technical specs or a…
Resurrection is a haunting work of psychological brutality, far superior to the metaphor-heavy trauma horror it’s being incorrectly lumped in with. Rebecca Hall has steadily amassed…
Ali and Ava is a more formally restrained work for Barnard, but one imbued with limitless compassion and hardscrabble authenticity. Clio Barnard’s 2010 debut film…
For a brief period of time in the early-to-mid 2000s, there was perhaps no more exciting international director than Bela Tarr. Advocates like Jonathan Rosenbaum,…
A dark night of the soul that gradually metastasizes into a howl of impotent anger at life itself, Mitchell Stafiej’s The Diabetic follows 30-something Alek…
Edward Yang’s 1986 film Terrorizers is an opaque, elliptical portrait of overwhelming ennui in a then modern-day Taipei, and one of the earliest examples of…
Glasshouse is a heady, challenging treatise on the nature of memory, its rippling interpersonal effects, and ultimately a horrifying study in survival of the fittest.…
When Jean-Luc Godard launched the experimental Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1968, one of their primary concerns involved creating radical texts that eschewed…
Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes doesn’t exactly add up to much, but it’s a viscerally wild ride of psychedelic visuals and ominous vibes for those willing…
A coming-of-age story about a sensitive, artistically-minded young man with filmmaking aspirations sounds like a recipe for mawkish solipsism, so it’s nothing short of a…
The Other One is an overcomplicated affair, but also a hyper-stylized and thrillingly violent one, and further proof that American blockbuster cinema is lagging. Released in…
Artist and critic Fred Camper once called Howard Hawks (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here) the “hardest to define of all the classic Hollywood auteurs,…