By Daniel Witkin | January 6, 2017
At the Museum

The setup of the film works less as narrative than as an inception point for numerous complementary and competing layers of fiction and reality, including the test footage for the film-within-a-film, scenes relating to its production, and footage of life in Tokyo.

January 2, 2017
Years in Review

No Home Movie, Toni Erdmann, Cemetery of Splendor, Cameraperson, Aquarius, Moonlight, Right Now Wrong Then/Sunset Song (tie), Silence, Certain Women/Knight of Cups (tie), The Illinois Parables

By Ela Bittencourt | November 29, 2016
Festival Dispatch

The casual, festive atmosphere of the FicValdivia Festival, located at the small university town on the banks of Valdivia River in Chile is fueled by its largely young programmers and audience.

La Jetée, I Walked with a Zombie, Creepy, Jacob's Ladder, Young Sherlock Holmes, Vampyr, The Pit and the Pendulum

By Adam Nayman | October 24, 2016
At the Museum

Just as Jay takes his place as the figurehead of a pagan cult, so too did Kill List crown Wheatley as the king of UK horror movies when it was released theatrically, a speedy ascension to a throne that had sat vacant since the 1970s.

Lots of huge, multimillion-dollar video games look very impressive from the dominant but qualitative perspective of judging digital visuals by how much they don’t look digital at all.

By Jordan Cronk | June 6, 2016
Festival Dispatch

Includes Mimosas, The Death of Louis XIV, Personal Shopper, Elle.

By Jordan Cronk | May 18, 2016
Festival Dispatch

This year’s Competition features a number of burgeoning talents as well as notable critical darlings, resulting in an uncommonly stimulating first week. On Sieranevada, Staying Vertical, Toni Erdmann, Slack Bay, Paterson.

By Brendan Keogh | March 24, 2016
Touching the Screen

Far Cry 2 perpetuates and depends on colonial themes and values as much as any open-world game, with the key caveat that it works a critique (or, at least, a cynicism) of the colonialist project into its playing.

The Berlinale takes great pride in promoting itself as the most politically conscious and engaged of the A-list film festivals. After the events of the past year in Europe, refugees were the salient topic of its latest edition.

By Nick Pinkerton | February 18, 2016
See It Big

There is no narration, no translation, and no explanation for the dense thicket of ritual gestures that we are peering into, each of which, one can intuit, has behind it an entire system of symbolic meanings.

By Jeff Reichert | February 18, 2016
See It Big

What if we could see what is actually on the other side of the world from where we sit? . . . Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky approaches these questions with a mixture of the digging child’s ingenuousness and the dogged explorer’s rigor and sense of purpose.

By Nate Fisher | February 14, 2016
See It Big

In Herzog’s 53-minute documentary on the Gulf War and its aftermath, the war begins and ends by the fourth minute.

By Fernando F. Croce | February 10, 2016
See It Big

Herzog rarely misses a chance to leap on canoes, wade through sludge, and handle native arrows. When he faces the camera and bares his zeal and fears, one glimpses a man capable of directing as well as starring in Moby Dick.