Annihilation feels like it might be the most Alex Garland thing that Alex Garland has written. The writer’s sixth screenplay – the second that he has directed – is the embodiment of all his most characteristic traits: it is far more interested in ideas than characters, it’s infatuated with the scientific processes at the heart […]
There is absolutely no reason for the wonderful 2015 short World of Tomorrow to have needed a sequel. But we got one, and it is equally wonderful. World of Tomorrow, Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts is a fucking miracle: it manages to succeed entirely as a follow-up to World of Tomorrow while […]
For the first 20 years of his career, Don Hertzfeldt – America’s greatest living independent animator – worked analogue. And not just analogue, but analogue. The fact that his short films were all drawn by hand on paper wasn’t merely a technical curiosity, it was central to how several of his best projects existed: Rejected, […]
I cannot tell you about the moments in Faces Places that brought me the most happiness. This is partially because those moments are clustered in the film’s last 30 minutes, and they are far too wonderful in their little surprises for me to dare spoil them. This is partially, also, because they are so pure […]
A previous version of this review appeared at the Film Experience. If one ever gets to feeling (as I routinely do) that American animation is in a rut from which it will never emerge, or at least not until the back side of some terrible economic collapse, there’s a simple enough solution: look to Europe. […]
I’ll say right out that if you’re the kind of person for whom “style over substance” is a bad thing, you’ll certainly have less of a good time with Atomic Blonde than I had (and I had a very good time indeed – it’s my favorite movie of summer 2017 to date). The film is […]
I’ll say this about Your Name.: as much as I love it (and I do, a lot), I really cannot begin to understand why this was the film struck such a huge chord, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film in the history of the Japanese box office (the second-highest Japanese production on that list) and the highest-grossing […]
Personal Shopper was booed at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival en route to winning the award for Best Director for Olivier Assayas, both of which are exactly right. I would be inclined to call it not merely a great film, but a very great film, and comfortably the best thing Assayas has directed since 2002’s […]
Best case scenario, I figured, was that John Wick: Chapter 2, would be in pretty much every way just as good as 2014’s John Wick – the best American action movie of the last decade and a half or more* – only without the jolt of novelty & thus not as enjoyable. Fairy tale, cloud […]
The Red Turtle is a miracle of transnational cinema: a great Dutch animation director hand-picked by Japanese filmmaking legends to make his feature debut with a Franco-Belgian co-production supported by a Japanese studio. The Japanese legends being Takahata Isao (who serves as this film’s producer) and Miyazaki Hayao, and the studio being Studio Ghibli. Which […]
Ironically, given that it is a movie expressly and entirely about the communicative power of the moving image, Cameraperson gives us the answer key to understanding everything about it in the form of a title card that precedes any other footage: “For the past 25 years I’ve worked as a documentary cinematographer. I originally shot […]
It’s rare enough for a filmmaker in these fallen days to release two major films in one calendar year. It is virtually unprecedented in modern times for both of them to be outright masterpieces, like Pablo Larraín has gifted unto the world in 2016. And both of them coming from the almost invariably shitty genre […]
