In 1909, during the final ten years of his short life, Jack London published a novel called Martin Eden. The story of a young man attempting to make his way in the world by becoming a successful writer, the film was, and was understood to be, London’s attempt to showcase all of the maddening problems […]

I’m no purist. I don’t think there are all that many things you need to include in a film adaption of the long-running video game series Mortal Kombat. While the games have a fairly involved overarching story line, I don’t really think most players are that aware of what it is, and anyway it’s been […]

The, as it were, “house style” of most Romanian films that get exported to the United States with any sort of visibly marketing push is already four-fifths of the way towards documentary: early milestones of the Romanian New Wave like 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lǎzǎrescu and 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days […]

A short while ago, a friend of mine suggested that we all have something like a quota of major contemporary world cinema directors that we can love, and once we’ve hit capacity, we’re not going to be able to get really excited anybody else. He was of course being facetious, but I take comfort in the […]

It’s an uncharitable thing to say about such a passionate work of cinema-activism, but there was not one moment in the 81 minutes of Time, a documentary about the excesses of the U.S. prison system and how it affected one family over the course of 20 years, where I could shake the feeling that I […]

I have from time to time mentioned that I have a rule of thumb for evaluating documentaries that I call the “glossy magazine” test: did I get anything from this movie that I wouldn’t have gotten from reading an article in a glossy magazine on the same subject. It’s basically a way of getting at […]

An apology, or if you prefer a warning: this is perhaps less on the order of a review than it is a rant. The thing is, I found Nomadland to be a completely repulsive movie, cloying when it works and actively pernicious when it doesn’t, and simply having to choke it down was galling enough; […]

There has been some muttering about whether or not it is strictly correct to call The Mole Agent a “documentary”, and to this I have only one response: I don’t really care what we call it, as long as we acknowledge that it’s charming and good. But also, it’s totally a documentary; it’s just that […]

Ramin Bahrani has long since passed into the subset of directors whose best work, I concede, is almost certainly behind them, while my regard for that best work remains so high that I will continue to regard every one of their new films as an event of at least minor importance. And “minor importance” is […]

Quo vadis, Aida? takes place over a few days in July 1995, in the small town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and if that date in connection to that place has any meaning to you, you already know more or less exactly what kind of movie you’re in for. And also, maybe you don’t. […]

I have never read Patrick Ness’s 2008 YA novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, the source material for the feature film Chaos Walking (the movie takes its title form the overall series of which the book was the first part). Indeed, until a day ago, I had never heard of The Knife of Never […]

The Man Who Sold His Skin is the kind of movie that sounds better when you’re hearing about it – or even when you’re describing it – than when you’re actually in front of it, watching it. If I were to tell you the ideas it was playing with, and how it assembles them all […]