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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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