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…
The Long Walk is an intricate and elegant work, sure to be one of the year’s best genre efforts and a remarkable calling card for director…
The Seed offers plenty of gooey, gloopy genre fun, but is ultimately too scattershot and arrhythmically paced to fully recommend. There’s always room out there for…
Arnaud Desplechin’s third feature, Esther Kahn, premiered to mixed reviews at the 2000 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Originally clocking in at 152 minutes, the…