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Janet Planet
(2023)
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Nora Caplan-Bricker
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The playwright's remarkable debut film immerses the viewer in the sounds and sorrow of a middle-schooler's endless summer.
Posted Jun 27, 2024
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Evil Does Not Exist
(2023)
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Phoebe Chen
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Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, an eco-thriller set in a sylvan Japanese town, explores the messy entanglements of human, machine, and nature that make up planetary existence.
Posted Jun 13, 2024
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Challengers
(2024)
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Erin Schwartz
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Challengers is worth watching for the cinematography alone, by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a frequent collaborator of both Guadagnino and the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul...
Posted May 06, 2024
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Flaming Creatures
(1963)
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Susan Sontag
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Flaming Creatures is a triumphant example of an aesthetic vision of the world -- and such a vision is perhaps always, at its core, epicene. But this type of art has yet to be understood in this country.
Posted May 02, 2024
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Love Lies Bleeding
(2024)
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Beatrice Loayza
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If the ensuing carnage feels mostly rote, Glass does manage to conjure a climactic image that brings together the film's ideas about excess and power, gender and fantasy...
Posted Apr 17, 2024
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The Big Heat
(1953)
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Manny Farber
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The characters seem to be wrapped thinly around steaming amounts of vengeance, avarice, or cruelty, but Marvin and Ford make it a well-acted movie that offers interesting impressions of how a practical-minded American male operates in crises
Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
(2023)
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J. Hoberman
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Indeed, given Jude’s willingness to engage with (or disinclination to disengage from) the cyber-powered second life, Do Not Expect is more despairing if even funnier than Bad Luck Banging.
Posted Mar 30, 2024
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Drive-Away Dolls
(2024)
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Vikram Murthi
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Ethan Coen’s horny homage to American film history’s many strains of queer comedy highlights the collaborative aspect inherent in his project as a director.
Posted Mar 30, 2024
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The Searchers
(1956)
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Robert Hatch
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Wayne's behavior is presented as the heroic stuff out of which the West was made. In fact, the ex-soldier he portrays is a psychotic with homicidal tendencies which he is given almost almost unlimited opportunities to indulge.
Posted Mar 25, 2024
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Dune: Part Two
(2024)
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Jorge Cotte
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The film warns us against the very thing it gives us. We watch from reclining chairs as Paul starts a holy war—our hands are clean. We get the heroic battles and the guilt on the side. Our hero is tortured so we don’t have to be.
Posted Mar 12, 2024
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About Dry Grasses
(2023)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Long, dense, and elliptical, Ceylan’s films are thorny and difficult, and rousing in their starkness.
Posted Mar 01, 2024
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Joan Baez I Am a Noise
(2023)
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Sarah Seltzer
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I Am a Noise, a career-spanning documentary, makes it clear that the folk singer was one of the most important political musicians of her generation.
Posted Jan 02, 2024
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American Fiction
(2023)
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Stephen Kearse
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A buzzy film adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure, a novel about publishing’s racial politics, misreads what is truly ailing the book industry.
Posted Jan 02, 2024
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May December
(2023)
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Beatrice Loayza
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Todd Haynes’s discomfiting and hypnotic suburban melodrama examines topics the director knows well: sex, taboo, and control.
Posted Dec 29, 2023
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Phantom Parrot
(2023)
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Natasha Hakimi Zapata
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Phantom Parrot sheds light on the Orwellian technologies being used across borders to repress activists, journalists, and others.
Posted Dec 11, 2023
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The Killer
(2023)
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Beatrice Loayza
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The Killer works because there’s more than mere automaton stylings. There’s a tension, heightened by each tight frame and scrupulous composition...
Posted Dec 04, 2023
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Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks
(2002)
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J. Hoberman
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A three-part, nine-hour look at the painful decline of a once-thriving industrial zone...Wang has immersed himself in the lives of migrant workers...
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Youth (Spring)
(2023)
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J. Hoberman
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The prolific director examines how the People’s Republic became the workshop for much of the world.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Three Sisters
(2012)
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J. Hoberman
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Wang’s magnificent 2012 portrait of young children in a subsistence-level village in Yunnan province...
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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State Fair
(1933)
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William Troy
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Not since Wallace Beery’s The Champ has any American picture striven so hard for a feeling of place. The choice of Phil Stong’s novel was of course an excellent one for the purpose.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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Jorge Cotte
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Unlike the visions of unbounded freedom found in traditional westerns, Martin Scorsese’s new film is a study of a West bounded by the vertical geometry of oil rigs and the violent conspiracies of powerful men.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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Jeet Heer
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Killers of the Flower Moon offers a vivid and compelling study of racism as domestic violence.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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The Killing of Sister George
(1968)
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Harold Clurman
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The spurious seriousness of the picture spoils the comedy, while its brave assault on convention is little but hollow show.
Posted Oct 03, 2023
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The Birthday Party
(1968)
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Harold Clurman
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Pinter’s ear is so keen, his method so economic and so shrewdly stylized... that his play succeeds in being both funny and horrific. He is aided in this by Friedkin’s direction.
Posted Oct 03, 2023
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Uptight
(1968)
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Robert Hatch
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Dassin, if he was issuing a warning, should have been explicit, and not allowed the viewer to wonder whether the implication he senses are no more than ineptitudes of presentation.
Posted Oct 03, 2023
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Traffic
(2000)
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B. Ruby Rich
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While the film does well at imagining a world cut loose from moral quadrants, where right and wrong are not clear choices and all decisions seem tainted by compromise, its imagination is confined to a US model.
Posted Sep 06, 2023
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Afire
(2023)
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Phoebe Chen
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Afire plays with that feeling of disjuncture before catastrophe alters what seemed at first like a listless summer into a week freighted with loss.
Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Sound of Freedom
(2023)
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Chris Lehmann
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The conflict and intrigue coursing through Sound of Freedom is not all that different from standard suspense-thriller fare, with overwrought asides in the film’s dialogue to remind viewers...
Posted Aug 15, 2023
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Shortcomings
(2023)
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Jeet Heer
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The movie Shortcomings lacks Tomine’s visual intensity. Despite this loss, it’s a fine film. I suspect it’ll spark many heated conversations about race, ethnic self-hatred and sex. If so, I also hope it brings more readers to the graphic novel.
Posted Aug 04, 2023
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Barbie
(2023)
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Tarpley Hitt
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In trying to say too much, the film winds up not saying much at all.
Posted Jul 31, 2023
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Barbie
(2023)
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Erin Schwartz
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Greta Gerwig tackles philosophical questions that are more daunting than a film based on a children’s toy can handle. It results in a strange, uneven, but beautiful movie.
Posted Jul 31, 2023
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Asteroid City
(2023)
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Jorge Cotte
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Anderson keeps showing us the seams of the production but otherwise plays each scene with emotional sincerity.
Posted Jul 14, 2023
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The Matrix
(1999)
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Stuart Klawans
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It's not just that The Matrix is to overblown silliness as Mount Rushmore is to big stone heads. To demonstrate their power, the makers of this trailer/video game/theatrical come-on have taken something precious to me... and tossed it onto the fire.
Posted Jul 12, 2023
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Mulholland Dr.
(2001)
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B. Ruby Rich
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If, in the end, Mulholland Drive is too clever by half, no matter. Lynch's superb command of mise en scène makes his images and situations their own reward, rendering even the simplest gesture creepy and imbuing any innocence with evil.
Posted Jul 11, 2023
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Unrest
(2022)
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J. Hoberman
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The tranquility is accentuated by the soft murmur of voices, the sound of wind in the trees, and the natural-light cinematography. Unrest’s pastoral quality recalls mid-period Straub-Huillet films...
Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Master Gardener
(2022)
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Vikram Murthi
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Master Gardener seems designed to provoke. But in his late age, the filmmaker has settled into an earnest style, fixated on love and second chances.
Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Strangers on a Train
(1951)
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Manny Farber
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Hitchcock’s latest film, Strangers on a Train , is fun to watch if you check your intelligence at the box office.
Posted Jun 20, 2023
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Showing Up
(2022)
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Alex Kong
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In Showing Up’s final scenes, the competing strains of defeat and possibility that unspool across Reichardt’s films are left suspended in a delicate counterpoint, as they are throughout her work.
Posted Jun 01, 2023
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Beau Is Afraid
(2023)
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Jorge Cotte
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The revelations we do get are simplistic; rather than enrich the film, they stamp out any interpretive wiggle room.
Posted May 24, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984)
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Andrew Kopkind
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Such attitudes place the movie’s emotional center of gravity at about age 11, which suggests that the filmmakers have lost one year of maturity every summer since 1981.
Posted Apr 19, 2023
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Knock at the Cabin
(2023)
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Stephen Kearse
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As much as Shyamalan tries to cloak Knock at the Cabin’s central conflict in metaphysical horror and familial crisis, disbelief persists: The viewer is always aware that they are watching another trite and incurious M. Night Shyamalan film.
Posted Apr 18, 2023
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(2008)
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Stuart Klawans
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As transparent as its title artifact, and just as obviously made from plastic, Crystal Skull conforms to type by offering a new version of old trash pleasures, only without the novelty.
Posted Apr 12, 2023
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Chris Rock: Selective Outrage
(2023)
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Ben Schwartz
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Both more and less than comedy, funny but also the occasion for a lot of clapter from Rock’s fans. Rock delivered on all the expectations swirling through social media over the past year, but it’s also OK if we never hear about that slap again.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
(2022)
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Ilan Stavans
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Disjointed and divisive, Bardo challenges its viewers to make sense of it.
Posted Mar 09, 2023
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Till
(2022)
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Robin D.G. Kelley
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Till is an unflinching critique of the assertion to always “believe women.”
Posted Feb 24, 2023
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Women Talking
(2022)
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Larissa Pham
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Where do the women think they’re going? What do they think they’ll find? Perhaps it’s possible, in the world the film has made, that what they depart for isn’t the world we know, but a better one, one created according to the contract Ona describes.
Posted Feb 15, 2023
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Avatar: The Way of Water
(2022)
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Erin Schwartz
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Avatar is like some rare mineral, produced by one man's ill-conceived aesthetic taste placed under the immense heat and pressure of the blockbuster industry. The product is scintillating, beautiful, and feels fairly useless.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Diabolique
(1955)
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Robert Hatch
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Clouzot is a man of intelligence and skill who shows himself to be excited by only two sensations -- cruelty and disgust. His appeal is as degenerate as the horror comics, and more offensive because it is more cultivated.
Posted Jan 31, 2023
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
(2022)
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Ethan Iverson
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Every step in the mechanism is designed to make an obvious point about abuse of power and self-involved excess. Yet, after all has been revealed, we realize that there was absolutely no reason for the whole contraption to get started in the first place.
Posted Jan 03, 2023
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EO
(2022)
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J. Hoberman
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The beasts give EO an authenticity beyond human acting, without the trappings of rational meaning. Behind the veil of Skolimowski’s bravura technique, life simply is.
Posted Jan 03, 2023
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