The Quiet Girl

There’s a simplicity to the story and the characters throughout The Quiet Girl that could possibly misdirect your expectations. In a tight 94 minutes, writer-director Colm Bairéad manages to exact a wealth of suspense and feeling,Read Full Review

Emily

The literary legacy of the Brontë sisters has sustained itself for centuries. Their novels and poetry are amongst the most well known in the world. Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights, is the most mercurial.Read Full Review

Magic Mike’s Last Dance

It’s indicative of Steven Soderbergh that each film in the Magic Mike franchise distinguishes itself against the one that came before it. Soderbergh has done this before, with Ocean’s Eleven and its two subsequent sequels. Despite hisRead Full Review

Return to Seoul

When Walt Whitman declared “I contain multitudes”, it was a defiant statement of personhood that contained a solidity of purpose and place; but containing these multitudes can often be a burden. Such is the caseRead Full Review

2022 Decent Maybe Awards

Best Director Gold: Todd Field, Tár Silver: Jordan Peele, Nope Bronze: Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave Best Actress Gold: Cate Blanchett, Tár Silver: Danielle Deadwyler, Till Bronze: Tilda Swinton, The Eternal Daughter Best Actor Gold: Colin Farrell, After Yang & The Banshees of InisherinRead Full Review

One Fine Morning

Mia Hansen-Løve has made no secret about the autobiographical nature of her films. If anything, it seems to be a point of pride. Her films have a kind of frank, episodic nature that might remind youRead Full Review

Alcarràs

The central conceit of Alcarràs – a Catalan family that runs a peach orchard in rural Spain faces the existential threat of globalization when their owner wants to convert their land into a plot of solarRead Full Review

Close

Over time, the Belgian film industry has developed a well-earned reputation for grim slice-of-life dramas that examine the granular aspects of domestic ennui. Writer-director Lukas Dhont is a follower in that tradition, though his twoRead Full Review

Saint Omer

The story of Medea, the sorceress from Greek mythology, is of a spurned woman who killed her children. On paper, this sounds like the worst crime imaginable. As the title character in Euripedes’ most famous play,Read Full Review

White Noise

“What would happen if Noah Baumbach got $100 million to make a movie?” is a question that, more likely than not, you’d expect to stay as a hypothetical. Thanks to Netflix, this thought exercise becomes aRead Full Review

The Best Films of 2022

Perhaps I went a little overboard. It’s usually a lack of discipline that causes me to spill over the usual “Top 10” at the end of the year and expand it. I won’t deny it, but IRead Full Review

Broker

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s uber-humanist approach to storytelling has produced some of the best films of the last twenty-five years, but his penchant for melodrama and sentimentality can sometimes lead him astray. His best films (like After Life or StillRead Full Review

Babylon

As Babylon winds down to its end – a conclusion that manages to be both sentimental and ostentatious – it seems to be making a case for the end of movies. Or, more specifically, that the “endRead Full Review

No Bears

It’s said that limitations can fuel creativity. No living filmmaker has taken more credence in that theory than Iranian director Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker whose persistence and prolific output hasn’t ceased even after being legallyRead Full Review

Living

The face of Bill Nighy is a character actor’s dream. Expressive, handsome, slightly devilish, Nighy has used that face (and his expansive, wiry frame) to great success in his decades-long career, which has seen himRead Full Review

Corsage

We all know what to expect of a royal biopic. The vast, sweeping palaces. Complex, ornate clothing. Rigid interiority thinly veiling robust emotion. Whether by design or by necessity of a limited budget, Corsage sidesteps a lotRead Full Review

Women Talking

The last time we had a new Sarah Polley was all the way back in 2013, when her documentary Stories We Tell laid bare the secrets that lie within her family. That film was tinged withRead Full Review

Avatar: The Way of Water

When he’s in between films, it does always feel like we’ve lost James Cameron to his infatuations. His submarine expeditions to explore the wreckage of the Titanic is still one of his great obsessions all theseRead Full Review

Empire of Light

Empire of Light is a movie that has a lot of reverence for the more granular details of cinema. Yes, it takes place in a movie house and you often see the marquee lit upRead Full Review

The Whale

Samuel D. Hunter’s play The Whale is a work brimming with so much self-hatred that you can almost forgive the complete lack of care it takes with its delicate subject matter. Almost. The subjectivity of itsRead Full Review

Devotion

2022 has been a historically lucrative year for naval aviation dramas. Well, for one movie anyway. Top Gun: Maverick has made over a billion dollars worldwide since its release on Memorial Day weekend, a triumph that feltRead Full Review

The Eternal Daughter

David Foster Wallace once famously claimed that “every love story is a ghost story”. Like many of Wallace’s quotes, it’s a romantic gesture flush with alternate meanings. I don’t think of Joanna Hogg as a DavidRead Full Review

The Inspection

The Inspection excels at subverting your expectation. We have our notions about a US Marine Basic Training drama, and that notion gets even more narrow when you learn that the protagonist is a queer characterRead Full Review

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is part biography, part protest, part photo slideshow. The protagonist is groundbreaking photographer Nan Goldin, whose life is a constant battle between the hardships of her past, the emotionalRead Full Review

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Perhaps the most notorious line in the Lennon-penned Beatles song “Glass Onion” is “Well, here’s another clue for you all… the walrus was Paul”. The lyric is considered a smoking gun confession in the deepRead Full Review

She Said

The empire of Harvey Weinstein was built upon the idea of prestige. Weinstein and Miramax were a symbol of high artistic standard – in simpler terms, he ran successful Oscar campaigns. While his brother Bob reeledRead Full Review

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

In the annals of doomed Hollywood epics, the production of Wakanda Forever has to be up there. After suffering the death of its main star Chadwick Boseman in 2020 – a presumably insurmountable hurdle for any movie –Read Full Review

Bones and All

Luca Guadagnino is far from the first director to make the connection between romance and violence, and to equate the rush both can give to a person. Bones and All has a lot of carnage throughout, butRead Full Review

EO

EO follows the existence of a stoic donkey who performs in a Polish circus. EO is the name of the film but it’s also the name of the donkey itself, whose life is in constant flux betweenRead Full Review

The Menu

The extravagances of fine dining are ripe for skewering. Chefs who fancy themselves geniuses – crafting plates that more closely resemble modern art than an edible meal – reach a level of pretension that canRead Full Review

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

In a year filled with auteurs making their autobiographical films, Bardo certainly stands out. If James Gray’s Armageddon Time is a New Hollywood-style exploration of the troubled domestic ethics within the Reagan era and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is a wide-eyedRead Full Review

The Fabelmans

The name ‘Steven Spielberg’ is synonymous with the best in Hollywood filmmaking. Other than Hitchcock, Spielberg’s name may be the first most people think of when they think of “movie director”. We are getting closeRead Full Review

Causeway

The meteoric rise of Jennifer Lawrence was so fast and furious that it’s difficult to remember that it all started with a tiny independent film called Winter’s Bone. Soon after Bone got her the first of herRead Full Review

Holy Spider

There’s a moment early in Holy Spider, Ali Abbasi’s new murder suspense film, where a news report about 9/11 plays on a television while a man has sex with a prostitute in the next room. It’sRead Full Review

Wendell & Wild

Henry Selick has directed a lot of animated films that you love, though you may not know it. James and the Giant Peach, Coraline, and his most famous film, The Nightmare Before Christmas have become so intertwinedRead Full Review

Armageddon Time

New York City is essential to the films of James Gray, where the outer boroughs provide a home for his various downtrodden characters. His last two films – The Lost City of Z and Ad Astra –Read Full Review

Till

The story of Emmett Till is a tragedy that has haunted several generations. His senseless murder at the hands of white men in Money, Mississippi caused a major shift in American politics which crescendoed in the CivilRead Full Review

The Banshees of Inisherin

The characters in The Banshees of Inisherin do not behave logically. In a way, the entire plot is pushed forward by inexplicable behavior by some and absolute befuddlement by others. As you watch, you may find yourselfRead Full Review

Aftersun

The power of memory can be arresting. Fleeting, but at times vivid, they are the foundations with which we build the story of own lives. We can’t trust our memories to be accurate, but weRead Full Review

Decision to Leave

If Park Chan-wook’s success in the early 2000s is defined by the brutality of hit films like Lady Vengeance and Oldboy, his latest decade is more defined by his sensuality. The violence never left, but in films like Stoker andRead Full Review

Triangle of Sadness

It’s fascinating to me that a director as divisive as Ruben Östlund could win two Palme D’Ors in such a short amount of time. His idea of satire – nihilistic and mean, shooting the biggestRead Full Review

Tár

The finest orchestras in the world are filled with musicians skilled and fortified with a lifetime of practice and discipline who play their instruments to the peak of perfection; but who plays the orchestra? In a longRead Full Review

God’s Creatures

In the windswept, coastal Irish village that is the setting of God’s Creatures, harshness is a part of everyday life. We never learn what the town is called. The sky is a permanent gray and the ocean tideRead Full Review

Blonde

If one wanted to be generous to writer-director Andrew Dominik, they might say that his punishing, persistently unpleasant Blonde is a call of solidarity with its protagonist, Marilyn Monroe. An attempt to ease her painRead Full Review

Bros

The death of the romantic comedy has been declared high and low. Some say that it’s because Hollywood has sworn off all mid-budget adult movies to further invest in blockbuster spectacle, while others claim that movieRead Full Review

Don’t Worry Darling

Too many words have already been written about the troubled production of Don’t Worry Darling. On-set feuds between director and star, certain ne’er-do-well actors releasing compromising voicemails, even a possible spitting controversy at the film’s tempestuousRead Full Review

Moonage Daydream

The David Bowie estate has always been careful about any cinematic interpretations of his life and career. This was true even before Bowie’s death in 2016. Todd Haynes made one of the seminal films aboutRead Full Review

The Woman King

In the wilderness of West Africa in 1823, the kingdom of Dahomey lived amongst other tribes whose power and influence fluctuated with the rise of the European slave trade. What separated Dahomey from the restRead Full Review

Breaking

The legacy of the 1975 masterpiece Dog Day Afternoon is that every single bank robbery/hostage drama since has in some way borrowed from it. It’s become one of those inescapable things, like trying to make aRead Full Review

The Good Boss

Because we’ve all seen movies before, we know that Javier Bardem’s egomaniacal factory owner in The Good Boss will be anything but good. The title is a sly nod to its audience that knows that theRead Full Review