By Simran Hans | August 1, 2018

Akhavan is fascinated by the moment of seduction, like the precise tipping point when a playful kick turns into a nudging invitation. She is also interested in the moment when the spell breaks.

By Nick Pinkerton | July 24, 2018

Filling the big screen canvas with the small-screen desktop space, Unfriended: Dark Web is cinema for the age of the post-cinematic affect.

By Tayler Montague | July 9, 2018

Will is affected by not just PTSD but also a self-serving, deluded masculinity that is killing his relationship with the only person he has in this world. The central, intentional frustration of the film stems from our desire to see them stay together, even as he is denying his daughter the life and community she so desperately needs and craves.

By Nick Pinkerton | June 29, 2018

It contains a crowd-pleaser dance-off, and not one, but two Viagra jokes . . . Did you know it is possible to mist up and roll your eyes at the same time?

By Nick Pinkerton | June 22, 2018

Araby is a film in the form of an inquest, a postmortem investigation, searching for the key to unlock an extinguished existence, as though any one thing could suffice to explain a death, much less a life.

By Chloe Lizotte | June 8, 2018

Writer/director Jim McKay’s fifth feature, and his first since 2005’s Angel Rodriguez, is his most tightly plotted film yet, propelled by a momentum that’s often exhilaratingly fleet. Yet his emphasis on his characters’ everyday stakes keeps the film from feeling lightweight.

By Nick Pinkerton | May 18, 2018

A very good actor who has in recent years grown into a great one, Hawke gives an extraordinarily controlled performance as a man struggling mightily to retain dominion over himself.

By Nick Pinkerton | May 11, 2018

If Hong is indeed the best that we have got, there is something troubling about this fact. For it should detract nothing from the integrity of his body of work to say that, when taken altogether, it is a quintessential expression of a cinema of disappointment and diminished expectations.

By Adam Nayman | May 3, 2018

Even the most resourceful, imaginative filmmaker would be hard-pressed to redeem the screenplay, specifically the lengths to which Cody goes to disguise the true nature of the story, and also the underlying reasons for the charade, which are unconvincing and in bad faith.

By Nick Pinkerton | April 24, 2018

That Denis can produce a work that, without a trace of preciousness, is equal parts indebted to Barthes and Chicago blues, connected as arm is to shoulder to the film-historical legacy of post-New Wave French filmmaking, is only further justification for claim that the 71-year-old is the greatest working director over the last two decades.

By Kelley Dong | April 13, 2018

Though it bears the markings of a gut-wrenching horror film, A Quiet Place is stubbornly optimistic about the existing order.

By Devika Girish | April 12, 2018

“It is a time when this country is under a lot of criticism, rightly so, and I have found my place in portraying certain things, but showing them to you in a way that you get to make your own judgment. And so far, I have been very moved that people want to see the good of this country.”

By Josh Cabrita | April 12, 2018
At the Museum

Gibson shows that filmmaking is an extension of a practice that is already proactive and lived. The evolving relationship between filmmaker and subject is retained implicitly in nearly every shot and interaction.

By Adam Nayman | April 11, 2018

If one of the principal powers and pleasures of cinema is its ability to momentarily suspend thoughts or cares about what lies outside the frame, then Zama can be taken an object lesson in manipulation. Every strenuously controlled moment and movement constitutes an irresistible entreaty to simply go blank and watch.