“You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.” So declares May Bartram to John Marcher, both doomed lovers of Henry…
In an edition of surprises, programming eclecticism, and a refreshingly measured jury performance, Nicolas Philibert’s Golden Bear win for his latest documentary might yet prove…
Where do irony and sincerity stand today, both with respect to each other and to the cultural scene at large? A litmus test for endorsing…
A curious counterpoint to Celine Song’s much-lauded Past Lives may be found in Mimang, Kim Tae-yang’s feature debut, and the relative prestige of the former…
Speculative fiction tends to valorize the unreality of utopianism more than the concreteness of dystopian realism, and perhaps intuitively so: in the act of speculating,…
Much like Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift — whose audaciously hypnotic visuals and elliptical narrative heralded a major directorial presence — Anthony Chen’s third film,…
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 along,…
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 modern…
What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection for…
The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of realism.…
In Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, the protagonist — a young office worker named Fran (Daisy Ridley) — leads a scheduled life both…
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 qualify…
A major fear factor in horror stems from isolation, and its pervasive influence extends to both claustrophobic and agoraphobic conditions. Whether confined within a box…
“I shall. For it is a happy tale.” So begins the lurid odyssey of flesh reformed and soul remade, a marionette reanimated by its creator…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to the…
Between the birth of the civil rights movement and the present dearth of ideological nuance, no small credit should be given to the former for…
Some types of horror are cosmic; others cautionary. In our day and age, when productions often come with a press kit full of themes, it’s…
In a small village in Jharkhand, east India prowls a tiger; this tiger is misogyny, and its fellow tigers constitute the broader institutions of patriarchy.…
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 precedes…
Film is a collection of stills, yet rarely is film still; in the empire of the moving image, action and reaction reign supreme. But action…