In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid.…
The opening shot ofTrương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam depicts two men in enveloping darkness. One carries the other on his back as he…
Despite many noble dead on the field, the battle to prohibit video games from the hall of art has long since failed. The temple…
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia begins, as so many stories do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, 30-something Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is driving to his rural…
Set in the year 2019, An Unfinished Film is a fictional documentary about a film crew that reunites to finish a queer feature from…
Empires, as a rule, do not exist in the plural, for each empire conceives of itself as sovereign and total. In practice, this solipsism…
Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s…
“This must be my punishment,” narrates Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), as he recalls the frog he tortured in a grade school science class. Mickey…
The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended…
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, after premiering at last year’s Venice Film Festival and winning the festival’s prize for Best Screenplay, amassed an unforeseen…
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic…
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language films have operated in a particularly confessional mode. Featuring The Room Next Door’s co-star Tilda Swinton, his 2020 short…
The linchpin scene of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist arrives nearly an hour into its 215-minute runtime when Adrien Brody’s Hungarian architect, László Tóth, sits…
In Werner Herzog’s latest, Theater of Thought, the director largely known in his documentary work for discursive flights of wonderful pontification takes an American…
Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel of the same name, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys grapples with a level of tragedy and systemic…
After spending his early career transfiguring the aesthetics of early Jean-Luc Godard and other works from the French New Wave’s starting days for his…
Since his 2011 debut feature Snowtown, Justin Kurzel’s films have displayed a laser-like focus on rough, sometimes savage men and the environments that foster…
Six years ago, Mike Leigh produced his first war film, Peterloo, in which domestic unrest in 1819 led British troops to slaughter protesting civilians.…