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…
“I find ghosts in Japanese horror much more terrifying. In the standard American horror canon, because a ghost violently attacks you or comes after you,…
It feels churlish to criticize Shlomi Elkabetz’s Black Notebooks project, a deeply personal documentary that’s part travelogue, part diary entry, and part remembrance for his deceased sister, the…
A breathless, even primal, survival thriller, Haider Rashid’s Europa works like gangbusters as a propulsive bit of genre filmmaking, but less so as the empathetic…
The Halt is another epic and epically long Lav Diaz effort, one that might be his most accessible work yet. When dealing with Lav Diaz,…
Premiering at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, before going on to win the prestigious Dragons & Tigers Award for emerging Asian cinema at that same…
Being a Human Person ends up a bit formless, but it presents a complex portrait both of an artist and of the disconnect between action…
Vicious Fun fails as both horror cinema and horror deconstruction. Wes Craven’s Scream has been justly lauded as an epochal moment in horror cinema, a…
The Evil Next Door forgoes character development and clever plotting in an effort to manufacture cheap scares. Is there anything more boring than a competent,…
My Heart Can’t Beat… impresses both as psychodrama and horror, the kind of film destined to live under viewers’ skin. There’s an aching sense of…
Gaia is a masterwork of oppressive mood, a brutal, almost Biblical portrait of creation and destruction. There’s an ancient, malevolent force living in the depths of…