Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has directed 15 films in the last 12 years, a breakneck pace to rival even Hong Sang-soo. Not many seem to…
There’s a remarkable kind of alchemy at work in Hubert Charuel’s Meteors, an addiction story that transcends the typically staid strictures of the genre to…
Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done begins with a cryptic series of images; pitch-black night, a pile of discarded clothing, closeups of various faces, impassive…
There are so few solid, meat-and-potatoes American action films every year that get studio resources and an actual theatrical release that one is almost tempted…
The opening sequence of Gareth Evans’ new Netflix original Havoc — a hotly anticipated action epic from the director of the modern classic The Raid…
Alternating between icky-squishy horror, fish-out-of-water comedy, and doppelgänger abstraction, director Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic certainly lives up to its title. If the whole thing ultimately feels…
While the title gives the impression that this is an Asylum-style mockbuster ripping off the little-loved Brad Pitt-starring Bullet Train, the new Bullet Train Explosion…
In a recent interview with critic Carlos Aguilar, filmmaker Isaac Ezban recounts seeing Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth while in film school and being bowled…
A man wakes up on a crowded bus. He’s in a strange neighborhood, with no idea how he got there. He just wants to get…
Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player) Greta…
If the new indie neo-noir Gazer feels familiar, riffing on any number of classic thrillers as well as newer models like Memento and Too Late,…
One often encounters the (admittedly lazy) critical idea that a particular film “would’ve been better as a short,” suggesting that whatever ideas or formal attributes…
There’s an opaque yet stern quality to Kaloyan (Ognyan “Fyre” Pavlov), a heavily tattooed young man returning to his small Bulgarian hometown after many years…
James Ashcroft’s 2021 debut feature, Coming Home in the Dark, was a deeply disturbing exploration of how the powerful wield their authority over others and…
It becomes clear very early on that the new documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders is going to be largely incoherent. What is unclear is how…
There have been many movies about baseball, that most American of sports — it is axiomatic. They can be nostalgic, romantic, or even, increasingly, tech-inflected…
Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s Labour’s…
Coming-of-age movies are a dime a dozen, at this point practically an entire sub-genre of Sundance-approved indie calling cards. Which is perhaps why Henry Bernadet’s…
In his recent book Filmmakers Thinking, Adrian Martin quotes the German filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky at length regarding the “dialogues” that all filmmakers are engaged in;…
You’ve got a really good cast doing sturdy, reliable work in an otherwise largely generic crime dramedy with Riff Raff, the latest from director Dito…