Carmen Paddock 
When asked to define the word eephus, many may just give up. The word sounds almost made-up if you do not come from the world of baseball. If you are a fan of the great American pastime, however, an eephus is a known quantity. It is the name for a …
Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight seems, upon its opening, to be a quotidian domestic drama. Uma (Radhika Apte) has one key problem taking over her life: she and her new husband, Gobal (Ashok Parthak), are not at all compatible. Those who arranged their marriage failed to account for fundamental differences in …
In The End, Joshua Oppenheimer turns his camera from documentary towards fiction while continuing his exploration of the lies people tell themselves. The film opens with a young man (George Mackay) painstakingly painting miniature figures and landscapes onto a large diorama; on closer inspection, the diorama seems to encapsulate a …
Luck is not a belief unique to Americans, but The Luckiest Man in America – a half-fictionalised dramatisation of real events directed by Samir Oliveros – makes the case that no one commits to the myth of random good fortune with as much aplomb as does the denizens of the …
Director José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço’s I’ve Never Wanted Anyone More is the latest entry into a very, very long tradition – 250 years and counting, in fact. The film is a loose modernised adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 episolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (indeed the …
At first glance, Armand – from writer and director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel in his feature debut – seems cut from the same cloth as Roman Polanski’s 2011 film Carnage and Fran Kranz’s 2021 film Mass: thrillers of the interpersonal, where parents of squabbling, troubled, or otherwise problematic children come together …
Universal Language, the latest from Canadian director Matthew Rankin, follows Abdolreza Kahani’s A Shrine as another delightful Iranian-Canadian comedy hitting the 2024 international film festival circuit – a welcome trend, judging by the quality of these two excellent films. Written by Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, and Rankin, a vignette structure …
Based on the bestselling book by Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing rockets viewers back to 1972 Belfast with an explosive opening scene. The miniseries employs different framing devices to Keefe’s nonfiction tome, but both work to great effect. Widowed mother of ten Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) sends her eldest daughter …
Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film in 13 years was always going to generate excitement, but Megalopolis – since its divisive Cannes premiere and disastrous marketing campaign with AI-generated quotes (the fault of US distributor Lionsgate, not Coppola) – is almost a sensation. Add in a star-studded cast, some of …
Timestalker, the sophomore directorial feature of writer-director Alice Lowe, takes the Shakespearean adage “The course of true love never did run smooth” to its most extreme and fantastical conclusion. Lowe plays Agnes, a woman who lives an ordinary life with only a nagging, unplaceable inkling that something is missing. More …
The title of writer-director Daisy-May Hudson’s latest feature, Lollipop, hearkens to a sticky-sweet childhood candy and its colorful, innocent connotations. Yet this film opens with a collect phone call playing over the BFI funding title card, notifying the recipient that it is from a British prison and how to decline …
The documentary genre is well acquainted with the strangest facets of the human experience, but *smiles and kisses you* – the sophomore documentary feature from director Brian Carberry – broaches an unorthodox relationship with an almost reckless candor. The film follows Chris, a 36-year-old gas station cashier in rural North …
Stories of young adulthood’s unique growing pains are familiar fodder for feature films, and writer, director, and film editor Axel Cheb Terrab’s first feature Gala & Kiwi is a startling, rough-around-the-edges look at a friendship gone awry in these turbulent years. This time of life immediately after leaving one’s family …
After opening with a quote from Herman Hesse’s famous novel of social and spiritual isolation, Steppenwolf – the latest from director Adilkhan Yerzhanov – moves away from the German-Swiss author’s work that shares its name into another interpretation of “a wolf of the steppes.” This takes the form of an …
Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing opens from the wings of a theatre. The camera moves hazily through sparkling streamers hanging from the stage ceiling before emerging on John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo) performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rapturous applause breaks out, and the entire cast joins …
Amy Liptrot’s breathtakingly poignant and unsparing memoir The Outrun has been acclaimed by critics and adored by readers across the world since its 2016 publication. Eight years later, the book loses none of its effect – the description of a very personal journey through familial mental illness, addiction, substance abuse, …
Not much is known about Josef Mysliveček – the 18th-century composer at the center of writer and director Petr Václav’s lavish historical biopic The Bohemian – in the English-speaking musical world. It is known he was on good terms with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the two composers vied for recognition …
In Hit Man, Richard Linklater’s latest film, the beloved director teams up with his star Glen Powell to write a script loosely based on a stranger-than-fiction news feature by legendary Texas Monthly reporter Skip Hollandsworth. It should be stressed that the real story, while remarkably gripping, does not go quite …
The sun-soaked seediness of LA is immediately apparent in Sugar, Mark Protosevich’s neo-noir crime drama. Sugar follows Colin Farrell’s eponymous private detective hired for one case, which quickly spirals into a wider network of rich girls gone wrong, drugs, questionable law enforcement, polaroids, self-destruction, and other such Hollywood crime and its visual signifiers. John Sugar: A Golden-Hearted Detective …
AppleTV+ seems to be carving out a nice niche for itself in prestige period miniseries that combine the holy trinity of the genre: star-studded casts, rich production design, and a topic of historical importance delivered with a glossy respect. Franklin, created by Kirk Ellis – perhaps previously best known for creating HBO’s magnificent miniseries John Adams – fits the …