May 21, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton star in ‘Mad Max’ creator George Miller’s ambitious but misfiring fairy-tale romance ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’.
May 20, 2022
Jay Weissberg
A solid though cautious, slow-burn loss-of innocence tale wrapped around the struggle between State versus Religion set (but not shot) in Cairo and designed for Western consumption.
May 20, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Experimental lo-fi director Mark Jenkin finds a rich seam of pagan folk-horror buried in the rocky terrain of England’s weird wild west in ‘Enys Men’.
May 20, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Director Marie Kreutzer and star Vicky Krieps give a famous 19th century Austrian empress a subversive feminist remix in their joyously imaginative Cannes premiere ‘Corsage’.
May 20, 2022
Deborah Young
An immersive portrait of writer-director James Gray’s family in 1980s Queens, N.Y. is woven around the young protag’s dawning social consciousness.
May 19, 2022
Deborah Young
Mathieu Vadepied’s affecting portrait of paternal love hinges on intensely involving performances by Omar Sy and Alassane Diong, as an African father who goes to war to protect his conscript son.
May 18, 2022
Jay Weissberg
A disappointingly anemic take on the great composer’s unfortunate marriage, gloriously shot by Vladislav Opelyants yet hampered by Kirill Serebrennikov’s less than penetrating narrative.
May 12, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Tom Cruise returns to his career-making role as a hotshot U.S. Navy pilot in director Joseph Kosinski’s shallow but action-packed sequel ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
April 23, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Fashion icon Vivienne Westwood and her son Joe Corré attempt to reclaim punk’s radical roots in director Nigel Askew’s scrappy but engaging documentary ‘Wake Up Punk’.
April 20, 2022
Deborah Young
Hossein Tehrani’s gently melancholy first feature about poor farm laborers, which won Tokyo’s Asian Future competition, reveals a strong new Iranian voice.
April 14, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Scottish director Jono McLeod’s debut documentary ‘My Old School’ is a highly entertaining account of an outlandish fraud and its lingering aftershocks.
April 4, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
In a West Bank documentary that begins like a thriller and ends like a drama, Daniel Carsenty and Mohammed Abugeth introduce a new path into a conflict that never leaves the news.
March 31, 2022
Stephen Dalton
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED OCT. 9, 2021 Stephen Graham gives a raw, red-meat performance as a troubled chef in this sizzling single-shot ensemble drama now on Netflix.
March 7, 2022
Deborah Young
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED SEPT. 13, 2021 Ukrainian activist Oleh Sentsov directs a hard-boiled gangster tale set in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose over-the-top violence is starkly undermotivated.
February 19, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Musician Colson Baker, aka Machine Gun Kelly, plays a drug-damaged pop star in director Tim Sutton’s ‘Taurus’, a stylishly sleazy but self-indulgent depiction of toxic fame.
February 18, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Akuol de Mabior’s first feature-length documentary isn’t quite cohesive, but it offers a partial portrait of a troubled country and one of its female leaders.
February 16, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Hong Sang-soo’s 27th feature, and his third in competition in Berlin in as many years, offers his trademark acerbic humor, anchored by veteran Korean actress Lee Hye-young’s caustic turn as an embittered writer.
February 15, 2022
Deborah Young
On his first completely solo flight directing without his late brother, Paolo Taviani pays a stirring salute to Sicily’s great novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello.
February 13, 2022
Clarence Tsui
An anonymous collective of Burmese filmmakers delivers a powerful statement of defiance against the murderous military dictatorship that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government on February 1, 2021.
February 12, 2022
Stephen Dalton
French screen heavyweights Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon trade bruising blows in ‘Both Sides of the Blade’, a conventional but gripping love-triangle drama from veteran Gallic auteur Claire Denis.
February 11, 2022
Jay Weissberg
Egyptian queer experimental cinema comes into its own with this playful, visually inventive sex-positive short feature that repurposes “One Thousand and One Nights” using gay Arab cultural signifiers.
February 8, 2022
Stephen Dalton
A young woman struggles to process personal trauma and wider social injustice in Norwegian director Anders Emblem’s slender but quietly haunting drama A Human Position,
February 5, 2022
Stephen Dalton
French director Mabrouk El Mechri’s screwball action comedy about domestic violence, Kung Fu Zohra is admirably audacious but misses the target.
February 3, 2022
Jay Weissberg
The vestiges of politically-instigated past trauma come back to trouble an older couple in their second marriage as they begin ruminating on their demise in Gao Linyang’s subtly crafted, detail and performance driven feature debut.
February 1, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Gessica Geneus’s debut feature is a superb meditation on sisterhood, motherhood, and what it means to love a failing nation.
January 31, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Focusing on the plight of both working-class locals and migrant labourers in a small town, Juichiro Yamasaki’s third feature powerful chronicles the greying fortunes of Japan’s depopulated provinces.
January 26, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
This frequently perplexing sci-fi musical has a lot to say about the politics of race, but its true triumph is its music and gorgeous visuals.
January 25, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
‘Babysitter’ steers clear of preachiness in its half-scolding and often amusing examination of sexual and sexist attitudes in the wake of #MeToo.
January 22, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Director Kathryn Ferguson’s engaging music documentary Nothing Compares explores Sinéad O’Connor’s legacy as both icon and iconoclast, with input from the scandalous singer herself.
January 21, 2022
Stephen Dalton
A masterful Bill Nighy, director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro relocate Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru to post-war London in the quietly powerful remake Living.
January 20, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
An insightful exploration of youth, ambition, romance, and meaning through the lens of a young woman you both identify with and love to hate.
January 14, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Originally reviewed Oct. 12, 2021 – NOW ON APPLE TV Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand and a solo Joel Coen turn Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty classic Macbeth into a ravishingly beautiful game of thrones.
January 9, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Boasting stunning imagery and a great back story, Bhutan’s first film to make the Oscar shortlist works a well-trodden premise into a beautiful, humanist and accessible picture.
January 7, 2022
Stephen Dalton
George Clooney directs Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar, a warm-hearted but flat coming-of-age drama.
January 5, 2022
Jay Weissberg
The unsettled protagonists of Hamzah Jamjoom’s “Rupture” seem to be literally pulled through past, present and future in this Italian-inspired thriller in which a woman’s sanity is disturbed by her pregnancy and a malevolent concierge (played by Billy Zane) with his own unsavory baggage.
January 4, 2022
Deborah Young
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel ‘The Lost Daughter’ strays too far from Italy to be convincing, but a stunningly good Olivia Colman saves the day.
December 30, 2021
Patricia Boero
Panama’s Oscar-shortlisted drama eloquently portrays class divides, as a bereaved upper-class architect seeks redemption in her friendship with a homeless, street-smart boy.
December 24, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Denmark’s shortlisted Oscar contender Flee is a warmly personal animated coming-of-age documentary about an Afghan refugee coming to terms with his sexuality and painful family history.
December 18, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
A haunting low-fi meditation on memory, social class and political protest that won the Golden Eye documentary award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
December 6, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Director Adam Donen’s messy but ambitious debut feature Alice, Through the Looking brings together Lewis Carroll, Jean-Luc Godard and Monty Python in a hellish post-Brexit London.
December 5, 2021
Stephen Dalton
A Chilean family sail into stormy waters in director Nicolás Postiglione’s tense, gripping, politically charged suspense thriller Immersion.
December 2, 2021
Deborah Young
Jane Campion’s bold cinematic interpretation of Thomas Savage’s novel about cattle ranchers in 1920’s Montana is a sensuous, aestheticized Netflix release, whose meticulous detail and gay subplot are admirable but a little tiring.
November 24, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Mali-born filmmaker Seydou Cissé comes at the theme of African immigration through the lens of spirituality.
November 23, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
In his skillfully helmed first feature, Isaac (Izaokas), Lithuanian writer-director Jurgis Matulevicius delves into his country’s turbulent past under both Communism and Nazism, following a trio of friends in the 1960s whose lives are overshadowed by a massacre that took place during WWII. Mixing historical fact with an existential crime story, the film is bathed […]
November 17, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
Filled with enough gyrating dead corpses to cast the next Zack Snyder movie several times over, director Péter Bergendy’s Hungarian horror flick Post Mortem is high on gore and jump scares, low on convincing storytelling and originality. It displays a solid level of craft, especially the heavy use of visual and makeup effects, but otherwise […]
November 12, 2021
Deborah Young
Bahman Ghobadi’s latest Kurdish story, shot in Istanbul, hovers between tragedy and humor without hitting the emotional high note it aims for.
November 4, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Moumouni Sanou’s award-winning documentary about the reality of working girls in Burkina Faso is marred by its lack of discretion.
November 3, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Feted Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s latest Oscar contender is a classy but underpowered drama about moral complexity and social media shaming.
November 1, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
A Ghanaian woman makes an anti-migration decision her friends and family disagree with.
October 25, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Controversial LA musician Annie Hardy plays an obnoxious American tourist battling demonic forces in the English countryside in director Rob Savage’s profane, provocative, hilarious found-footage horror comedy Dashcam.
