This is a banner for a second film review of After the Hunt. Image courtesy of the moviemakers.

‘After the Hunt’ Movie Review: All That Remains of This Hunt is Just the Deafening Void of Pretense

My expectations for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt were, I confess, moderate, but they leaned toward cautious optimism. I like most of his films, with Challengers being my favorite, and I generally admire his work, even if I don’t consider myself an unconditional fan. However, the initial reception of this …

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‘Hamlet’ Movie Review: Poetic Fidelity Suffocates the Modern Concept

Curiosity and hope were my personal feelings going into the cinema to see Hamlet (2025). I knew beforehand this would be another transposition of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy into a contemporary context, an exercise that’s always risky in itself. However, the decisive factor in giving the film a chance was, without …

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‘At Work’ Film Review: Bastien Bouillon is Quietly Compelling

In 2021 a small French movie called The World After Us played the festival circuit because it was one of the first modern movies to address life in the modern gig economy. It was a direct precursor to At Work, in that they are both about a novelist in Paris …

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‘The Last Viking’ Film Review: A Little Too Raw in All Sense of the Word

This comedy-thriller manages to be both very funny and gruesomely violent, with an appetite for the strange and startling that had the Venice Film Festival audience barking with shock as often as laughing. For the most part, the bold mood swings work, largely thanks to a setting which includes several …

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‘Motor City’ Film Review: Alan Ritchson’s 70’s Stunt Spectacular

There is a fascinating new trend in cinema gathering steam: action movies with hardly any dialogue. Finland’s Sisu from 2022 shows Nazis being slaughtered without saying much about it, while America’s No One Will Save You from 2023 has a young woman fighting off an alien attack. And now Detroit …

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‘The Blue Trail’ Film Review: Brazil’s Alternate Elder Reality

One of the central figures of the newest generation of Brazilian cinema, Gabriel Mascaro, is already a well-known name on the international festival circuit. His 2015 film, Neon Bull (Boi Neon), premiered at the Venice Film Festival. His next work, Divine Love (Divino Amor), world premiered at the 2019 Sundance …

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‘On the Road’ Film Review: David Pablos’ Venice Orrizonti Winner Is A Neo-noir Road Movie With A Schmaltzy Impulse

Winner of the Orrizonti Award for Best Film at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, On the Road (En el Camino) is, at its core, a poignant tale of repressed desire bursting in the most undesirable of places. It’s the fifth feature from Mexican writer-director David Pablos, and it’s the …

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‘Sweetheart’ Film Review: A Predictably Endearing Riff on the Coming-of-age Genre

There are only so many ways a film like Sweetheart, originally titled Gioia Mia, pans out. Special Jury Prize winner at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival’s Filmmakers of the Present competition, Margherita Spampinato’s debut feature is a predictably compelling take on the coming-of-age genre: a schmaltzy drama about grief and …

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‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’ Film Review: Rian Johnson’s Crisis of Faith

The formula established in Knives Out and Glass Onion has been changed in Wake Up Dead Man. The series of good old-fashioned murder mysteries solved by gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has been a roaring success because they were mostly about fabulously wealthy people being held to account. Tweaking the …

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‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow’ Review: An Epic 5-Hour Documentary

The Russian-American director Julia Loktev is a well-known director despite her small filmography. In 1998, she made her debut with Moment of Impact. Then, eight years later, she released her sophomore film with Day Night Day Night. She premiered her most prominent work to date, the 2011 film The Loneliest …

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‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Film Review: Paul Dano’s Remarkable Performance

Jude Law’s first appearance as Vladimir Putin is so eerily accurate the Venice Film Festival audience around me laughed in surprise. Who would have thought he could do it? Well congratulations to director Olivier Assayas and his casting director Antoinette Boulat, because the performance Mr. Law gives here is one …

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