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…
Holler stumbles a bit on the way to its ending, but its strength of direction, character, and milieu make for an often thrilling bit of industrial…
The Amusement Park is a remarkable work and profound reminder of Romero’s facility with pointed critique. Long recognized as one of the absolute masters of…
Chloe Galibert-Laine and Kevin B. Lee’s Bottled Songs 1-4 is an epistolary essay film in which the duo exchange four video letters, with each filmmaker…
Akilla’s Escape is an unfortunate mishmash of cliché and amateurism, never quite clear what it wants to say or be. Akilla’s Escape begins with a…
Beginning in 2015, following the (by all accounts exhausting) production of Phoenix, Christian Petzold returned to television, where he began his career in the 1990s…
2018’s Transit followed two period pieces, each set in a specific era highly important to director Christian Petzold: Barbara, which unfolds in East Germany in…
Caveat teases potential and boasts an impressive setup, but ultimately loses its thread after this initial stretch. One of the challenges of the modern horror…
Following his breakthrough film, The State I Am In, Christian Petzold returned to smaller-scale television production for his next project, 2001’s Something to Remind Me.…
One of the great madcap poets of the American cinema, Alan Rudolph has seemingly slipped into irrelevance since his heyday in the 1980s and ’90s.…
“Harun [Farocki] told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, [Night and Fog] was the movie that showed them what had happened…
Endangered Species is a lean, mostly successful little thriller that proves director Bassett’s legitimate genre chops. It’s difficult to remember now, but the last decades of…