There were rumblings last year when darling indie distributor A24 put out into the trades that they were beginning to look into more mainstream, commercial projects. In a little over a decade, they’ve put out someRead Full Review
The Outrun
At just 30 years old, Saoirse Ronan has already established a sterling reputation as an actor who can “do anything”. Nominated as an adolescent for her precocious performance in Atonement, she’s only capitalized on her potential inRead Full Review
Saturday Night
This year marks fifty years of Saturday Night Live on NBC, a live sketch comedy show that has survived dynastic political and cultural shifts, wild fluctuation in performance talent, and endless accusations of being “not funnyRead Full Review
A Different Man
It’s kind of a miracle that a film like A Different Man – an elliptical, analytical film the persistently prods it’s audience with moral and ethical questions – can also be such a compelling drama. OurRead Full Review
Will & Harper
Will & Harper is a film going for a broad audience and delivering mass messaging. Its cause is righteous and its motivations pure. The movie’s premise is simple: two longtime friends, one of which hasRead Full Review
Megalopolis
The journey of Megalopolis to the screen is astonishing. So much so it almost feels impossible that it would produce a mediocre film. Yet, here we are. Francis Ford Coppola called his shot in 2020, in anRead Full Review
The Wild Robot
Imagine, if you will, a movie for children that truly captures the full scope of everything that cinema has to offer, that doesn’t condescend to them with immature humor or overprotect them by hiding painful realities.Read Full Review
The Substsance
If there is one thing that stands out about the Cannes hit The Substance – well, apart from how gross it is – is it’s blistering rage. French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat does not have the inclinationRead Full Review
Rebel Ridge
Filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier wears a lot of hats in Rebel Ridge. He’s the writer and director, the producer, and the editor. He’s certainly not the first person to do all of these things on his movie,Read Full Review
His Three Daughters
The implacable tone of an Azazel Jacobs film – comedies tinged with melancholy, where moods swing inconsistently and dollops of surreality pierce the heightened exterior – is a very difficult balancing act. So difficult, inRead Full Review
Close Your Eyes
It’s been over thirty years since the last Victor Erice film. Considered to be among the greatest Spanish filmmakers of all time, his latest, Close Your Eyes, is only the fourth film he’s ever made. HisRead Full Review
Between the Temples
Many try to recreate the arch whimsy of Hal Ashby, a director whose offbeat comedies feel wholly singular even with all the imitators that have followed him. Wes Anderson has spun that quirky sensitivity intoRead Full Review
Sing Sing
When you get a movie like Sing Sing, which blends elements of narrative and documentary filmmaking, there can be a tension between the two disciplines as they fight against each other. It’s not always as seamlessRead Full Review
The Instigators
You don’t have to get too far into The Instigators before you realize just how low a priority it is for everyone involved. The movie stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, two actors whose canonical BostonRead Full Review
Good One
With a debut film, it’s easy to credit influence. You could watch India Donaldson’s Good One and notice that it’s all-natural set pieces and lived-in performances recall the earthy existentialism of Kelly Reichardt; or you may pegRead Full Review
Dìdi
Sean Wang’s Dìdi is a pretty standard coming-of-age indie dramedy. Think Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade meets Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap. The beats all have the familiarity of films you’ve seen from Rebel Without a Cause to Armageddon Time.Read Full Review
Twisters
Twisters is something less than a remake and something more than a sequel. It carries over none of the characters from the 1996 film Twister, but its spirit – and structure – recalls the regality of theRead Full Review
Longlegs
Now that we’ve retired the idea of “elevated horror” – a popular expression in the early 10’s, when exciting filmmakers started excelling within the genre – what to make of a film like Longlegs? Released by Neon, the latestRead Full Review
Green Border
In Green Border, director Agnieszka Holland is attempting to show us the wide swath of human behavior, from the inhumanly cruel to the generously kind, and everything in between. The film is set against the Polish-BelarusianRead Full Review
Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos achieving mainstream success in Hollywood probably seemed like a long shot if you were watching his 2009 film Dogtooth. That film, graphically violent and sexually explicit, got a miraculous Oscar nomination for Best International Feature atRead Full Review
The Bikeriders
In The Bikeriders, we have the return of Jeff Nichols, a director whose steady hand was behind several great films from the 2010s, including Take Shelter and Loving, his previous film. It’s been eight years since Loving, a movie thatRead Full Review
Janet Planet
“Every second of my life is hell,” states Lacy, an eleven-year-old girl living with her mother, Janet. Earlier in Janet Planet – the directorial debut from Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker – Lacy calls Janet from aRead Full Review
Robot Dreams
The beauty of simplicity is that recreating it in art actually takes a good amount of complexity. Truly affecting the wonder of the everyday takes commitment and skill. Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams is a testament toRead Full Review
Hit Man
When we bemoan the loss of “real” movie stars, what we’re really yearning after are performances like Glen Powell’s in Hit Man. It’s not just that we want to see our favorite big screen crush inRead Full Review
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
If Mad Max: Fury Road felt like so much more than a legacy sequel, that’s because it was. Perhaps it was the abundant trend in the 10’s of rebooting every stitch of franchise IP that madeRead Full Review
The Fall Guy
Ah, the movies. You gotta love ’em. Director David Leitch is a stuntman turned filmmaker, and his films have always had a self-referential wonder with their own existence. It’s never been more explicit than it isRead Full Review
I Saw The TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow, the latest film from Jane Schoenbrun, is perhaps the most quintessentially millennial film ever made. Its fondness for the unhinged television programming of the 90s and 00s goes beyond nostalgia.Read Full Review
Evil Does Not Exist
Attempting to properly tell a story that fully encapsulates our ecological moment is a daunting task. Say what you will about Paul Schrader’s First Reformed – I find its ideas fully cooked but its narrative underwhelmingRead Full Review
Challengers
It’s pretty common for sports movies – the good ones, anyway – to use said sport as a metaphor for what the characters are going through off the field. It’s a standard screenwriting conceit, practicallyRead Full Review
Civil War
Alex Garland has never been a political artist, though politics are often hovering uncomfortably in the background of his films. He prefers the intimacy of immediate experience, but his scripts – both the ones he’sRead Full Review
Monkey Man
The promotional materials for Monkey Man want you to think of John Wick. You can say this about the promotional materials about any action movie nowadays, but with this film we get some direct parallels, including theRead Full Review
The Beast
There’s always a risk when making a film as wide-ranging as The Beast, an intentionally strange and melodramatic film about the most common of human emotions. A magnum opus about the constant battle between love andRead Full Review
La Chimera
Alice Rohrwacher is creating in a league of her own. Her narratives possess a deceptive formlessness that requires an amount of commitment from the audience. If you don’t lean into the romantic idiosyncrasies of her storiesRead Full Review
Problemista
When A24 decided to market Problemista, they chose to emphasize its idiosyncrasies, as if writer-director Julio Torres was a Gen Z Charlie Kaufman. This seems to be the best way for any indie distributor looking toRead Full Review
Love Lies Bleeding
Movies as thoroughly – and earnestly – horny as Love Lies Bleeding don’t get made very often anymore. And much has been written about how they don’t get made very often anymore. I don’t think that directorRead Full Review
Dune: Part Two
If 2021’s Dune feels more like a commercial for a sequel than its own complete story, it’s because it was just Denis Villenueve’s proof-of-concept, a cinematic argument that the sequel was actually possible. It was onlyRead Full Review
About Dry Grasses
About Dry Grasses exists in a paradox. It takes place in a rural Turkish village in Eastern Anatolia, which pummels its working class population with endless, unforgiving snow. The people of the village stumble through man-madeRead Full Review
Io Capitano
In the first twenty minutes of Io capitano, the latest from Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, we see two teenaged boys living in West Africa who dream of making the treacherous journey to Europe to pursue a musicRead Full Review
Drive-Away Dolls
Now that we’ve gotten a feature film from each of them on their own, I find myself fascinated by the separation of Joel and Ethan Coen. Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021 was a triumphRead Full Review
The Taste of Things
There is a long tradition of films about food, where the detailed preparation and the effort in the kitchen becomes just as important as the drama outside of it. Kore-eda’s Still Walking, Stanley Tucci and CampbellRead Full Review
How To Have Sex
The provocative title of Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut, How To Have Sex, might make you think of an exploitation comedy released in the early 2000’s, where the sex lives of high schoolers was fair game for movie studios,Read Full Review
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
It is undeniable that the cinematic skill in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is peerless. It’s camera technique – the brilliance with which it alters the frame within single shots, the grace with which it movesRead Full Review
Decent Maybe Awards for 2023
Best Director Wes Anderson, Asteroid City Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer A.V. Rockwell, A Thousand and One Alice Rohrwacher, La chimera Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall Best Actress Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall Greta Lee, Past Lives Natalie Portman, MayRead Full Review
Tótem
In just over ninety minutes, the latest film from Lila Avilés feels like it contains the entire world. Tótem takes place almost entirely in a single home, during a single day and night, where an extendedRead Full Review
Origin
Ava DuVernay’s decision to make a narrative adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s non-fiction book Caste, is a daring choice. It leaves her vulnerable to criticism and many have jumped at the opportunity. It’s an ambitious decision, tryingRead Full Review
Society of the Snow
Society of the Snow probably isn’t helped by the fact that the most consequential plot point of its story – that a group of rugby players resorted to cannibalism in order to survive in theRead Full Review
Memory
On the surface, Michel Franco’s Memory seems to play notes that feel familiar to other trauma-based indie dramas. Our protagonist, Sylvia (played by Jessica Chastain), is a sexual assault survivor and recovering alcoholic. When she firstRead Full Review
The Best Films of 2023
If Hollywood in 2022 was defined by the encouraging commercial success of Top Gun: Maverick, then this year it was doubled by the twinned blockbusters that were Barbie and Oppenheimer in July. Barbie being a massive hit was not a surprise,Read Full Review
The Color Purple
There’s a lot of reverence throughout the latest film version of The Color Purple. Firstly, there’s a dedication Alice Walker’s novel, the original text and one of the most beloved pieces of American literature in the TwentiethRead Full Review
The Teachers’ Lounge
In Ilker Catak’s latest feature, The Teachers’ Lounge, a school instructor must find the balance between protecting her students and protecting herself. The task proves harder than you’d think, especially as the school’s byzantine office politicsRead Full Review