Eternity and ephemerality are frequently taken to be worlds apart, but they each belie a wistful attitude toward the enterprise of life. In Ghost…
It wouldn’t be a stretch to claim that Daaaaaalí!, Quentin Dupieux’s 77-minute portrait of the surrealist artist, is a biography of some kind. Nor…
Frat lives fall flat. That, at least to the outsider, is a reasonable conclusion to draw from the many unwelcome instances of its bearers…
“Our dominance is supreme and our isolation is profound.” These words, taken from N. Scott Momaday’s essay, “A Storyteller and His Art,” pronounce the…
Not much is said about the blemishes of an auteur’s career, especially if they prove to be wholly uncharacteristic of its maker’s blueprint. Idiosyncratic…
Cinema’s obsessions with images are the result of its propensity for their proliferation: although literature tempts the wayward imagination, cinema is what drives it…
“Someone’s inside.” These two words, uttered with ominous clarity, spur Jason Yu’s invigorating debut, Sleep, into malevolent and mysterious somnolence; for in the world…
Pascal Plante’s third feature, Red Rooms, premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, before screening to both critical and popular acclaim at Fantasia, where…
In 2002, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival to a storm of controversy, eclipsed — for better or worse…
“Starting positions” was the ominous refrain Dale Cooper’s evil doppelgänger used, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, during an arm wrestling showdown; something…
Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in…
The psychoanalytic term of the “big Other” is a fancy shorthand for our symbolic social order, and it’s what delimits most of our everyday…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of…
Death and destruction are the mainstays of war, but it is war’s fatigue — long-drawn and uncertain, for both its combatants and victims —…
The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows…
Every now and then, it seems, a genre film with an especially topical message enters the discursive fray to stimulate debate, provoke reaction, and…
Genre fare has sunk to new depths with The Dead Thing, Elric Kane’s first solo-directed feature — and an enervating one at that. There’s…
Conspicuously absent from the fall festival circuit, Fatih Akin’s Rhinegold bowed at the Filmfest Hamburg back in October 2022, and is only now getting…