Some pacing issues occasionally upset We Need to Do Something’s otherwise effective tone, but it remains a solid, low-ceiling genre exercise. We Need to Do…
Superhost isn’t heavy on style and runs out of steam too early, but Gracie Gillam’s outlandishly unhinged performance keep things from becoming bland rehash. A companion…
Yellow Cat is the kind of cribbing-as-mode film that illuminates nothing other than the kinds of movies its director likes. Godard once declared that all you…
Faya Dayi is the best kind of documentary, one that eschews prefab forms and instead finds mesmerizing beauty in the quotidian. Programmed as part of Sundance’s…
Filmmakers Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo interpret the title of their new essayistic documentary Double Layered Town/Making a Song to Replace Our Position very literally;…
In Johnnie To’s 2007 film Mad Detective, the eponymous cop is a gifted but troubled investigator who “sees” people’s inner personalities, which To visualizes by…
The Old Ways is a mid-budget genre gem with a few tricks up its sleeve to keep these fresh. Possessions and exorcisms have been a…
Following the release of last year’s Blood Quantum, Rueben Martell’s Don’t Say Its Name is a welcome addition to the still-small genre of Indigenous horror.…
Daniel de la Vega’s On the Third Day, co-written by Alberto Fasce and Gonzalo Ventura, begins with three separate lives intersecting on a dark, lonely…
The debut feature of New York-based filmmaker Oudai Kojima, Joint takes the structure of a rise-and-fall gangster picture and tries to imbue it with procedural…
While fellow 2021 NYAFF entry Joint admirably (if ultimately unsuccessfully) attempts to reconfigure the Yakuza picture for a modern, 21st-century audience, Kazuya Shiraishi’s Last of…
There’s a rich history of indie filmmakers getting their start with low-budget crime pictures. It’s easy to see why: The genre gives ample opportunities for…
A stop-motion animated epic over seven years in the making, Junk Head is the work of one obsessively dedicated man, Takahide Hori. An interior decorator…
Bleed With Me is too generic as a familiar, slow-burn mood exercise, but Moses has plenty of technical acumen to recommend keeping an eye on…
Annette is somehow both Carax’s weirdest and safest film, a letdown even as its vision remains bold. One-time enfant terrible Leos Carax, foremost contemporary purveyor…
Teddy feels awfully familiar and its bid at upsetting that template doesn’t quite work, but the Boukherma brothers at least present a clear sensibility that could…
Fullt Realized Humans is a half-realized film, awkwardly sliding between authenticity and sitcom superficiality. Bland but inoffensive, Joshua Leonard’s post-mumblecore rom-com Fully Realized Humans resembles nothing…
The Boy Behind the Door doesn’t do much that hasn’t been seen before, but mostly works on the strength of its careful, expert craft. A tough,…
Rock, Paper and Scissors starts off beguilingly odd, but fails to ever realize its genre potency and soon falls into wheel-spinning. There’s something very wrong…
Settlers offers neither genre thrills nor any real interrogation of the material’s potentially rich subtext. Part sci-fi thriller, part western, part survivalist drama, Wyatt Rockefeller’s Settlers…