Maxance Vincent 
If you think Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetics will get more refined after his films have, over the years, preferred a more digitized (read: pixelated, desaturated, out-of-focus) aesthetic, think again! His latest film, within a corpus of slow cinema experiments, What Does That Nature Say to You, contains many of …
Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake is a difficult film to watch. For 105 minutes, the Iraqi filmmaker’s directorial debut puts us in the middle of Saddam Hussein’s despotic reign and shows us harsh realities that many Western viewers are unfamiliar with. Even with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and economic sanctions …
Anyone who will discuss Akinola Davies Jr’s My Father’s Shadow will immediately recognize – and laud – that its politics are morally sound and cogent. It might even be an angrier film than you think, even if it mainly focuses on the distant relationship two young brothers, Akinola (Godwin Egbo), …
Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Yunan begins with the exasperated breaths of its protagonist, Munir (Georges Khabbaz), who, in the doctor’s office, is getting his lungs examined. Nothing is wrong with them, yet Munir consistently has difficulty catching his breath or even breathing normally. His doctor believes it might be psychological and …
The introductory section of Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister (La petite dernière) is slightly alienating, as it swiftly moves from one scene to the next, without an anchor point for the audience to latch onto, despite being adapted from Fatima Daas’ 2020 autofiction novel of the same name. However, our …
Who would’ve thought that the first studio production of the year would be a genuine heater, especially given that the January slate doesn’t usually promise a good time at the movies? Who would’ve also thought that a major Hollywood studio would greenlight what is essentially an exploitation film, promising a …
“The most detestable habit in all modern cinema is the homage. I don’t want to see another goddamn homage in anybody’s movie. There are enough of them when you’re unconscious.” – Orson Welles, 1982 Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is a competently made movie. It has some of the most stunning cinematography …
After a botched limited theatrical release, Joachim Rønning’s Young Woman and the Sea is now available for all to view on Disney+. Strangely enough, the film never received any theatrical footprint in Canada, the next-door neighbor to the United States, and was announced as a ‘Disney+ Original’ when it made …
No filmmaker is more unconcerned about the audience than Quentin Dupieux. His previous movie, Yannick, was an hour-long dark comedy that tiptoed around in circles as its titular character (played with pitch-perfect timing by Raphaël Quenard) turns a grating complaint about the play he’s watching into a total nightmare for …
Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is the latest project from the versatile filmmaker. It’s hard to keep track of what projects Guy Ritchie is currently working on, as one gets seemingly announced every week. And while most on Film Twitter spheres have complained about Ritchie pumping out two …
Ryusuke Hamaguchi has never made the same film twice and has always approached each project he takes on with a different lens and perspective on what he did previously. It’s highly apparent just by watching his Oscar-winning feature, Drive My Car, a nearly three-hour-long, slow, and meditative drama, and his latest project, Evil …
La Chimera is a complicated film to describe, and not necessarily because the story itself is confounding, but because the occupation of our protagonist, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), bewilders all expectations. We meet him as he is recently released from prison and reunite with Sister Flora (Isabella Rossellini) as they await his …
Road House, from director Doug Liman and starring Jake Gyllenhaal is now streaming. Should we compare remakes to the original? This central question guides most film critics when they compare a modernized version of a popular film made decades ago. Some say we shouldn’t hold the original as the only …
It’s hard to discuss the nature of One-Percent Warrior without discussing the elephant in the room: Tak Sakaguchi. The film, directed by Yamaguchi Yudai, not only examines the nature of action films but also serves as a self-reflexive examination of Sakaguchi’s own career in the realm of Japanese action cinema, with turns in Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus, Sion Sono’s Why Don’t …
James Nunn’s One Shot had the biggest potential out of any direct-to-video actioner Scott Adkins led in so long: an action film staged like a one-take in which Adkins would topple as many baddies as possible as if the audience were playing a video game. And while it certainly contained its moments of pure spectacle, …
If you’ve ever had the chance to make a movie, chances are your mind will be tormented during the development, production, and post-production stages. While watching the rushes or beginning to edit your film, your mind may not enjoy what’s unfolding and will quasi-force you to come up with new …
Mia McKenna-Bruce Gives a star-making performance in this quietly devastating drama. The first thirty minutes or so of Molly Manning Walker’s feature directorial debut, How to Have Sex, is highly disorienting. Walker zips through one scene after the next at a breakneck pace as she posits the story as a coming-of-age tale where a group …
Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) opened the doors for many short but effective action scenes where its protagonist had a set amount of time to get from point A to point B, only for them to be stuck in innumerable (and preposterous) situations that would slow them down. That’s also …
Describing Ava DuVernay’s Origin to an average moviegoer may prove complex, especially concerning its opening moments, where Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) listens to a recorded phone conversation with the police and the assailant who murdered Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost). DuVernay and cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd recreate this tragic moment in American history chillingly, with Isabel listening attentively to …
Who would’ve thought a January-released musical remake of Mark Waters’ Mean Girls would actually be so fetch? Definitely not me, but here we are. Moreover, it’s a far better film than the 2004 original, with energy in front and behind the camera, making it a special piece of consumerist entertainment. There’s no denying the …