review
By Ryan Swen | May 16, 2025

Yamanaka has made two features to date, along with a few shorts and some contributions to television programs, yet her body of work already contains enough formal gambits and tonal shifts that one might expect from a significantly more experienced filmmaker.

review
By Lawrence Garcia | May 16, 2025

Rather than see the film as a tentative foray into fiction, it may be more useful to consider The Damned as a film that explores how one might have gone about making a documentary during the Civil War.

feature
By Hannah Bonner | May 9, 2025

Under soft lighting, amidst her drab surroundings, Hideko Takamine shines. As she and Tomioka open a bottle of shochu, Naruse keeps Yukiko centered in the foreground while Tomioka faces her in profile at the periphery of the frame.

review
By Justin Stewart | May 9, 2025

As Craig platonically courts his cool TV weatherman neighbor Austin with increasing sweaty neediness, you wait for the other shoe to drop and for the proceedings to turn ugly.

review
By Forrest Cardamenis | May 5, 2025

As the financial health of the film industry deteriorates, it will necessitate smaller crews, fewer shooting days, and various other constraints . . . Caught by the Tides represents a different kind of film that can emerge from unorthodox methods and stands as a testament to the medium’s long-term possibilities.

review, feature

The often solitary experience of analog filmmaking, as exemplified by the landscape films of James Benning, Babette Mangolte, and Peter Hutton, necessitates a free-form style that takes into account the scope and contingencies of nature itself.

interview, feature

There’s a delicious spaciousness to the first film by writer Durga Chew-Bose, which has all the sybaritic trimmings of a coastal summer: sun-dappled skin, chalky beach expanses, fresh fruit on the veranda, a perpetual breeze...

review
By Mark Asch | April 25, 2025

Blue Sun Palace represents a new aesthetic vernacular for stories of the New York City working class, betraying international inspiration more than Sundance-school neorealism.

review
By Eileen G'Sell | April 25, 2025

In Emergent City, a documentary by Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg about the Brooklyn Sunset Park district, community comprises more than a group of people who live within designated boundaries; it is a living, breathing body.

review
By Eileen G'Sell | April 21, 2025

Carrying on with the tradition of mingling eros with the abject, The Shrouds reimagines how we might visually regard our faithful departed.

interview
By Frank Falisi | April 18, 2025

The fugitive joys of the characters in Killer of Sheep emanate, as they so often do, from the collision of art and the body. A dancing woman clings to her lover’s chest, and a boy leaps between building tops. A voice within me cries: ascendence remains not only plausible, but essential.

review
By Kelli Weston | April 18, 2025

If the vampire lore in Sinners does not quite cohere, a more compelling pattern unfolds. Coogler seems to recycle a premise he first staged in Black Panther: that no one who embraces the American project may escape its grotesque transformations.

feature
| April 10, 2025
Touching the Screen

This year, each writer wrote about a single game that defined their year in play. We’ve named six GOTYs in total. Between those write-ups you’ll find a few odds and sods reminiscent of the annual RS Two Cents throwdowns.

review
By Katherine Connell | April 3, 2025

Tensions between an old and new guard of writers feature in Opus, which twists the Almost Famous concept of a writer going on the road with enigmatic musicians into a horror-comedy embittered about the state of relations between artists and critics.

review, feature

The result is less a collective narrative of the ongoing war than a collage of impressions and feelings that guide the viewer across geographical terrain and reveal a country’s citizens processing their trauma in wildly different ways.