It’s been a while since a movie has been so good at textures, both visual and aural. In Satisfaction you get an extremely clear sense of the sensations the characters are experiencing and the world through which they are moving. The plot in itself is much less pleasant, as it’s …
Malcolm in the Middle ran right while I was in the midst of my baby-having years. I had four kids from 1998-2003 (no twins!), and watching Hal and Lois navigate their life helped me feel a little less crazy with my own household. Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair …
On paper Low Rider sounds like fun: a grieving Londoner goes on a road trip across South Africa in order to connect with her father. Unfortunately Low Rider manages to take this solid concept and make it as dull and cliched as possible. People don’t talk with each other, but …
The King’s Warden was released in February 2026 and has already become one of the most successful movies in Korean history. That’s possibly because it tells a story already known to most Korean schoolchildren, like how American kids know about George Washington and the cherry tree. A boy king in …
It’s 2014 and Nadia (Monia Chokri) and Céline (Ella Rumpf) were recently legally able to get married in France. Hooray! And anyone who’s ever heard a playground chant knows what comes after love and marriage. Nadia is pregnant thanks to IVF and a Danish sperm donor, but Céline will have …
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 …
We first meet Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky (Adam DiMarco) on their wedding day. The couple are meeting at the end of the aisle, but it hardly looks like a joyous day. She pulls up her veil, a look of terror on her face, something very bad is going to …
Someday a movie in which a group of teenagers throw a mock funeral for a hamster, complete with stone-faced pallbearers carrying a small coffin past hordes of wailing kids dressed up to the nines, will deserve a bad review, but today is not that day. Black Burns Fast has an …
A clip has recently done the rounds of British social media of a well-known pundit asking a woman who she plans to vote for in an upcoming election. The woman says she doesn’t know, but she certainly won’t be voting for a particular candidate who she recently saw leaving a …
Sometimes when you get good at keeping secrets, you can start to lose track of what the truth even is. In her new series Imperfect Women, Annie Weisman examines the story of three best friends confronting the secrets they kept that may have led to the murder of one of …
It has taken decades, but Patricia Cornwell’s iconic literary character, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, has finally been brought to life. Nicole Kidman takes on the role of the unrelenting chief medical examiner trying to prove that the case that made her career wasn’t based on misinformation. Scarpetta is more than your …
I went into the screening of Reminders of Him with a very specific curiosity: how would an actress like Maika Monroe (Longlegs), who has such a solid career in genre cinema — specifically horror — behave in a role of exposed vulnerability, typically molded to pull at the heartstrings of …
In the Brazilian cinema history, there are classic examples of road trip films. One of them is Iracema by Jorge Bodansky and Orlando Senna, a time capsule on the Northern region of the country during the military dictatorship. Regionally, a landmark of the sensorial cinema in the country is Viajo …
Filipino filmmaker Jerrold Tarog’s historical biopic trilogy, which began a decade ago, may just have run its course with Quezon, notwithstanding the latest installment’s prescient coda. The movie first played in Philippine theaters in October last year and screened in the Limelight program of the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam, …
Say what you will about the French, it seems like everyone in that nation possesses savoir-faire. That is to say, they know the correct way to behave in any scenario. Whether it’s supporting a colleague having a bad day, mopping up bodily fluids without making a big deal about it, …
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 …
Hard work should always be enough, and yet we all know it never is. The excellent Shame and Money makes it clear what we lose when that’s not the case. Late in the film, about an ethnic Albanian family’s financial struggles in Kosovo, there’s a street scene in downtown Pristina …
There is a small rural enclave in southern Philippines called Sitio Masalay, whose fields were turned into a horrific site of carnage one fateful day in November 2009, summarily taking 58 innocent lives. In the aftermath, only 57 bodies were found, and one remains missing. Director Carl Joseph Papa presciently …
Whenever a filmmaker with the pedigree of Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) ventures into the realm of live-action, my attention levels are immediately raised. Stanton is one of the foundational architects of Pixar, a master at finding the soul in inanimate objects. Approaching In the Blink of an Eye, my expectations …
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), …