Never Rarely Sometimes Always can be broadly described as a coming-of-age film—the story of a teenage girl traveling with her cousin to procure an abortion is dependent on the main character’s young age—but as with her previous two features, It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, Eliza Hittman’s narrow focus and unconventional approach makes it…
An art dealer is hired to steal a painting from one of the most enigmatic painters of his day, and he is consumed by his own greed. Insecurities rise as this operation spins out of control. The Burnt Orange Heresy is a slightly uneven but engaging arthouse thriller, led by two fantastic performances and a…
Anatomy of a murderer by way of a trek through darkness, The Long Walk is a bleak, meditative horror film. It’s an intricate tale of the pain left behind by time, told from the perspective of a serial killer. A deeply emotional time travel story, this horror film from Laos should put the nation on…
Last we saw of Abel Ferrara was with still-undistributed Cannes premiere Tommaso in 2019, starring Willem Dafoe as an aging, self-hating director. Siberia, premiering at Berlinale less than a year later, is perhaps the director’s elusive, hypothetical film. Starring Willem Dafoe again, who had previously collaborated with the auteur on projects like Pasolini, New Rose…
Cinema without dialogue seems like a strange thing, especially outside the realm of silent film, and even more so when set in a bustling city. The new feature from Taiwanese-Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang is a slow meditation on loneliness and eroticism. Days opens with a title card that reads “intentionally unsubtitled.” This is not a…
Streaming services have been great lately for satisfying my appetite for cinema in these times. I’ve been visiting a lot of classic films from great filmmakers and hidden gems that I never would have discovered without this much time on my hands. Cue my surprise when I saw this new release from Netflix, a Spanish…
Small-town thrillers are mostly dominated by strong and complicated male characters. Even when there are female leads, the male characters will always remain integral to the story. But in the talented hands of the first-time writers/directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, that is not the case. They brilliantly reinvent the genre by telling the…
