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…
Reflection lacks the scale of Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, but its brutalist Wes Anderson-esque tenor makes for a difficult yet still hopeful study of war. While Ukrainian writer/director…
9 Bullets is a startlingly bad film, one that struggles to reach even basic competence in any individual or collective regard. In his recent book Why…
Virus: 32 isn’t reinventing the zombie film wheel, but its careful attention to craft and precise formalism mark this effort near the head of the class.…
If its title wasn’t a giveaway, Marvelous and the Black Hole is a quirk-heavy comedy that approaches authenticity in moments, only to retreat back into its…
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a bold, terrifying portrait of the Internet’s isolation/connection dichotomy. There’s something bracing about encountering a genuine oddity like…
Navalny is a valuable film in our age of geopolitical misinformation, but also skews toward hagiography and relies too heavily on an info-dump style format. Presumably…
How exactly to represent historical atrocities on screen has been an overriding ethical and formal concern for filmmakers for almost as long as the medium…
Capturing the fuzzy conceptual and materialist fluidity of modern globalization has become something of a go-to subject for contemporary non-fiction film. It’s a huge, even…
The 1970s was an important decade for Clint Eastwood; in a remarkably prolific run reminiscent of the classic Hollywood studio masters, the man starred in…
Bull offers genre fans 80 minutes of satisfyingly amoral brutality, but its swing-for-the-fences finale misses the mark. There’s no shortage of revenge pictures out there; at…
Babi Yar. Context is another notable work from Loznitsa, one that represents an important act of remembrance while also remaining frustratingly vague and lacking in, ironically,…
Superior sources a number of eerie genre influences in the creation of a bold, singular debut. Functioning as both an expansion and direct continuation of her…
Sin Eater is a remarkably rough first draft masquerading as a finished film. There’s a recent episode of the PVD Horror Podcast that features the cast…
One of the primary pleasures of the film festival experience is encountering lower-profile new films and new creators free from the burdens of buzz or…
There’s a furious call to revolution at the heart of Mariana Bastos’ Raquel 1:1, a sneaky-smart exploration of institutionalized misogyny masquerading as a vaguely “elevated”…
Întregalde is a humble, human-scaled story expertly told and sure to be one of the best films of the year. Radu Muntean might not be as well…
Watching Joële Walinga’s new experimental found-footage documentary Self-Portrait, one is reminded of Abbas Kiarostami’s thoughts upon the Cannes premiere of his 2002 film Ten: “If…
Ultrasound is appealing in spurts but frustratingly sticks to a safe middle ground where it could have stood to be messier. Rob Schroeder’s Ultrasound exists on…