At its heart, Patricia Ortega’s MAMACRUZ radiates a tender and thoughtful warmth for its sympathetic main character, a woman whose womanhood has, after decades…
Film trailers sometimes embellish the truth, and other times overturn it entirely; Sony Pictures Classics’ preview of The Son, however, proves remarkably faithful to…
“READ ME”: a visage lit in orange glow, hands, bodies, hands caressing bodies, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, the two words blinking mutely from…
Rarely does the weight of a classic so gracefully crimp under the weightlessness of an earnest successor, less keen on displacing the gravitas of…
Of the so-called “three amigos” — comprising Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu — whose films have in recent years penetrated…
It takes a kind of charming naïveté these days to purport to represent the vagaries of sexuality onscreen without so much as a sideways…
Any nerve-shredding tendencies present in Nocebo are punctured by its clunky exposition, predictable ending, and insistence on trite messaging. There are two kinds of…
Descendant is a piercing work of ethnography that takes on America’s original sin with intelligence and nuance. Reclaiming history has, historically, been an arduous process,…
Ana Lily Amirpour’s foray into prestige television isn’t entirely unexpected, given both her affinity with idiosyncratic, highly stylized horror cinema and a cultural demand…
The Lobby’s punishing perspective and comical presentation make for a wryly self-deprecating inquiry into death and all things philosophical. “There is no here here”…
Rimini possesses a frigid sociological potency whose disparate elements capture a stratified generation’s cultural and libidinal imaginary. The curtain doesn’t quite fall in wintry…
Triangle of Sadness vacillates between slight but sly commentary and outright gaudiness, but an enigmatic, delightfully bathetic ending ushers Östlund’s film out on a high…
Terrifier 2 is a breath of fresh horror air, hilarity, melodrama, brutality, and unhinged schtick rolled into one grisly package, all of it supported by…
The Silent Twins flattens any psychological depth found in its characters and suffers from a directorial style mismatched to the content at hand. The…
Ozon’s frivolous Fassbinder homage doesn’t quite engrave much that is substantive or memorable. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tragically short and tormented life has been the…
“Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.” — James Cameron…
Squeal is an occasionally striking study of the fairy tales men tell themselves, but it too often feels floundering and under-cooked to be regarded…
At its core, the intellectual thesis of Julia Murat’s intelligent if inconclusive film belies a more emotional investment. As its title might imply, Rule…