It is occasionally the case that a film has such a perfect first shot that, the moment it appears before your eyes, you already know that you’re about to see a masterpiece. Atlantics has such a first shot: a sleek new skyscraper rising in the background above a street in Dakar, capitol city of Senegal. […]
Before I go anywhere with A Hidden Life, the tenth film directed by Terrence Malick in 46 years, and also the sixth in just the last eight years, I must remind you all that I am a fanboy incapable of anything like the proper objective distance from this director and his work. When the critical […]
In truth, it doesn’t matter to me that it’s a Romanian film (I tend to love Romanian films), a dark comedy (most of my favorite Romanian films are dark comedies), a story about totalitarian politics (my favorite Romanian dark comedy, 12:08 East of Bucharest, is about the nation’s history of totalitarianism), or as the cherry […]
In space, maybe, nobody can hear you scream, but in High Life, space is marked out primarily by the thick omnipresence of sounds. The lucky 13th feature film by director Claire Denis – and her first in English, a leap she navigates with a force and confidence that equals any other great director’s forays into […]
I would certainly not want The Dead Don’t Die to be anybody’s first exposure to director Jim Jarmusch, but since it has an unusually wide release for that director, and an unusually friendly genre for that director (it’s a comic zombie movie), and a seemingly endless list of famous people in the cast, it seems […]
The reputation Climax has earned for itself – one of them, anyway – is that it’s the most likable, audience-friendly feature of the five made by infamous French provocateur Gaspar Noé. The best I can come up with is that this is a polite way of saying “no explicit cumshots in this one”, because there’s […]
Lee Chang-dong is by no means the most prolific of the many great South Korean directors to come to major prominence in the 21st Century: Burning, his sixth feature, comes to us after a long eight-year gap since his fifth, 2010’s lovely Poetry. But he does maybe put up a real fight to be considered […]
Want another opinion? Check out Conrado’s thoughts on the film! Every movie, even if just by accident, starts out by telling us how to watch it. Roma, the eighth feature film directed by Alfonso Cuarón (who also takes solo screenwriting credit), just happens to be unusually great at doing this. The film’s exemplary opening shot […]
No film could possibly earn such a monumental title as Cold War, and at 89 minutes, the new Polish film going by that title (or, anyway, that title in Polish) is hardly monumental besides. But that’s okay, it’s a masterpiece anyway, the best film yet made by director/co-writer Paweł Pawlikowski. And with his last film […]
If it’s possible to be completely blown away by a movie and simultaneously to think that it’s the most exhaustingly pretentious thing, then that’s exactly how I feel about Vox Lux. The second film directed by indie art film actor Brady Corbet feels very much like “film directed by an indie art film actor” would […]
The new film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by David Kajganich under the title of Suspiria is a remake of the 1977 Dario Argento film also titled Suspiria. It’s official, in the credits and everything, and they share the same plot: an American girl named Susie Bannion (“Suzy” in the original) travels to Germany […]
The adjective that recommends itself above all others in connection to First Reformed is “unrelenting.” You might, if you have absolutely no idea how cinema works as a medium, be able to avoid figuring out precisely what writer-director Paul Schrader wants you to think about the world, industrialisation, religion in 21st Century America, and despair; […]
