Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in a…
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 lives…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of proving…
Death and destruction are the mainstays of war, but it is war’s fatigue — long-drawn and uncertain, for both its combatants and victims — that…
The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows his…
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 a…
Without further context, one could be forgiven for conflating Skywalkers: A Love Story with yet another Star Wars spinoff. Donning the Jedi’s patronymic and draped…
Parables, as with social satires, have been considered both ripe for adaptation and stubbornly resistant to reinterpretation; although Kafka and Orwell have seen their fair…
Republics, as it were, are spaces of contradiction — the citizens’ collective supreme authority refracted through the figures of their representatives — whose political legitimacy…
As documentaries go, the subject of plant life tends to suffer from a lack of tangible movement. Inertia, ascribed to the slow-moving, still hearkens back…
There is a provocation inherent in the depiction of sex as sensation: shed the vows and the assurances of deep emotional connection, and all that…
Enzo (Georgios Giokotos) and Magda (Astrid Drettner) are brother and sister, but they don’t always get along, and their rocky relationship has had its share…
The murder mystery has proven conducive, in recent years, for mashing up tired genre formulae. It has also provided a studded launching pad, marketing and…
The provocations of the Italian poet, critic, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini have been, for contemporary viewers, largely condensed into that one magnum opus of…
In Tiger Stripes, Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature, a trio of twelve-year-old girls contend with the sudden and inexplicable physical changes that occur inside one…
Co-opting traditions as metaphors for the struggles of everyday life has always been cinema’s staple, either because these traditions romanticize the world or because they…
In contrast with the high-profile and ostentatious trappings of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which enmeshed the idiosyncrasies of genre with patent identity politics, Kit…
Your films have been widely described as having thematic preoccupations with the future and its anxieties, but at the same time they also are imbued…
What would Andrew Tate or the late Theodore J. Kaczynski make of Sasquatch Sunset? The litmus tests of this cinematic curio, which is more or…
Scarcity, meet self-interest: with the rising threat of ecological collapse and the persistent wherewithal to do little about it, dystopian scenarios have increasingly sought the…