As film critics, we have been unclear what to do with our despondency, other than one clear thing: direct our outrage away from suffocating social media channels and toward writing, reasoning, wrestling with ideas, praising, hoping, questioning.
The comparatively bite-sized, almost four-hour The Woman Who Left feels like a work that could start to open Lav Diaz up to a larger U.S. audience in a way that Norte, the End of History, his last film distributed here did not.
The need to resolve the dangling narrative threads of popular works of art is truly a pox. If everything is spelled out, then there is no room left for mystery and imagination. It is always better to allow the mind to race just enough so that it deepens the things that we see and hear.
Over the course of a career that runs far deeper than just his 1994 groundbreaker Hoop Dreams, James has continually given classical documentary storytelling a good name.
How do the circumstances surrounding the Executive Order Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth echo the events of Pasolini’s dangerous masterpiece?
Filmmaker Stephen Cone’s empathetic fable represents a quiet rejection of all that’s contained in the Muslim Ban, or, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.
The potential consequeces of Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals for High Priority Infrastructure Projects intersect with the creeping gentrification anxiety on display in It Follows.
Trump’s order Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States creates echoes of one of our nation’s darkest moments.
An upper-crust costume drama without the courtly trappings or whalebone stiffness, the film has nary a tripod shot in sight, and moves along with a disconcerting, lurching motion.
Free Fire is often reminiscent of the cash-in Tarantino-esque titles that invaded video stores after Pulp Fiction, time capsules like 2 Days in the Valley, City of Industry, or 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, rather than being a new or exciting thing of its own.
Without ever seeming to reign supreme over the European festival scene as, say, the Dardenne brothers or Michael Haneke have at various points, Dumont anticipates and exemplifies features of the contemporary art film to a greater degree than either of those Cannes mainstays.
The Lost City of Z is beautiful, all the more so for not being beautiful in the obvious ways. Working for the second time with cinematographer Darius Khondji, who also shot The Immigrant, Gray films both jungle and English countryside with long lenses and a shallow depth-of-field.
A Quiet Passion proposes the outwardly unspectacular life of Emily Dickinson not as the story of a no-hoper spinster but as an act of courage, the struggle of a woman to overmaster herself, to sacrifice her own life (and preserve her maidenhead) so that her work might live.
Graduation drops viewers firmly in contemporary Romania, and offers the image of a nation where the trappings of modernity have been uneasily papered over a people and culture with a deep history of patriarchal tribalism.
The first live-action take on the material, a big-budget Western production from Paramount and DreamWorks, is a worthy addition to the canon, if still exceedingly dubious in a number of its particulars.