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,…
Family Dinner, Austrian filmmaker Peter Hengl’s feature-length debut, has one insurmountable problem — it hews so closely to the folk-cult horror handbook that anyone who’s…
Natalia Sinelnikova’s We Might As Well Be Dead begins with a bedraggled family slowly traversing a long road through dense forest, a towering high rise…
Jonathan Rosenbaum is fond of quoting British critic and curator Michael Witt on Godard; Witt writes that “If Godard… has repeatedly suggested that the cinema…
Crimes of the Future is a fascinating, ambitious project from Cronenberg, who readily sources his own career-long preoccupations in the creation of something that feels…
After Blue is a delirious visual experience, but Mandico stretches his few ideas far too thinly, resulting in a beautiful but repetitive trudge. Bertrand Mandico’s…
It’s a common misconception of auteurism that once a filmmaker has been so designated, every film by that particular artist suddenly becomes an unimpeachable masterpiece.…
With DASHCAM, Savage threads a tricky needle of Screenlife, first-person POV, and found footage cinema, but if you can vibe with the assemblage, there are…
Perhaps the single most of-the-moment film at 2022’s Cannes, Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision feels like it could be ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. A gritty war-time…
There’s an elusive, ephemeral quality to Clement Cogitore’s Sons of Ramses, a sorta-thriller that unfolds like a half-remembered dream. It’s only his second feature, following…
Given the ongoing international crisis unfolding in Ukraine, the films of Sergei Loznitsa — born in Belarus but raised in Kiev, and now living in…
There’s no doubt that a certain flavor of slow-paced, static-master-shot style filmmaking has become a film festival staple. Reporting from any major international fest will…
Black Site has obvious limitations that cap its ceiling, but as a DTV film in spirit if not in star power, it’s solid enough for target…
In a 2006 article for the online magazine Senses of Cinema titled “Mapping Catalonia in 1967: The Barcelona School in Global Context,” Rosalind Galt attempts…
The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with the violent death of…
A fascinating thesis and accompanying history lesson that never quite makes sense as a feature-length film, Travis Wilkerson & Erin Wilkerson new documentary Nuclear Family is trying to…
After Noé’s career peak with Climax, Lux Æterna represents a disappointing return to the director’s haphazard stylistic tics and overindulgent edgelord sensibilities. Like fellow provocateurs Lars von…
Human Nature’s looping narrative games don’t always work, but overall the film makes for an effective study of middle-class malaise. There’s not one, but two structural/temporal gambits…