More exasperating than the woebegone premise of Olivia West Lloyd’s feature debut is the experience of actually watching it all unfold. The film limps…
For as long as the cinematic form has existed, it has embraced nostalgia, that cultural drug which oversees virtually every socio-political framework known to…
What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection…
The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of…
In Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, the protagonist — a young office worker named Fran (Daisy Ridley) — leads a scheduled life…
A lush, elemental reckoning unfurls across the relatively condensed runtime of Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s debut, The Settlers, even if few of its proceedings strictly…
A major fear factor in horror stems from isolation, and its pervasive influence extends to both claustrophobic and agoraphobic conditions. Whether confined within a…
“I shall. For it is a happy tale.” So begins the lurid odyssey of flesh reformed and soul remade, a marionette reanimated by its…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to…
Between the birth of the civil rights movement and the present dearth of ideological nuance, no small credit should be given to the former…
Some types of horror are cosmic; others cautionary. In our day and age, when productions often come with a press kit full of themes,…
In a small village in Jharkhand, east India prowls a tiger; this tiger is misogyny, and its fellow tigers constitute the broader institutions of…
Writing in 1924, the rhetorician and literary critic I.A. Richards remarked, in his Principles of Literary Criticism, on the “futility of all argumentation that…
Film is a collection of stills, yet rarely is film still; in the empire of the moving image, action and reaction reign supreme. But…
The titular expression of Chong Keat Aun’s sophomore feature, Snow in Midsummer, has a political signification beyond its outwardly meteorological imagery. In Guan Hanqing’s…
Though they lived a millennium and a half apart, Aristotle and Dante Alighieri shared a conception of love that gave rise to most of…
For a work whose subject matter purports to straddle the lofty and permanent, its subject appears remarkably contingent. The Eternal Memory, Maite Alberdi’s latest…
The age of streaming is the age of accelerated attention — attention caught, swept away, and crystallized in breathless signification. Breathless, because what underlines…