Before watching a new Ron Howard film, I always carry with me a certain map of expectations. The filmmaker behind A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Apollo 13 (1995) has built a career marked by human stories with strong emotional appeal, coupled with a classical, assured direction that’s rarely devoid of …
Physical media shaped different generations of filmmakers. One of them, Alex Ross Perry, studies the golden age and the downfall of the video stores in Videoheaven. Consequently, the film explores the home video as the main distribution format after the original theatrical window. Known for his independent films, such as …
There are some shots of actress Suzu Hirose in A Pale View of Hills that are so gorgeous the audience at the Cannes Film Festival gasped aloud. Cinematographer Piotr Niemyjski clearly made heavy use of visual effects in his work – not least for the many gorgeous shots of Nagasaki …
No one quite knows what to do with director Fatih Akin. His explosive early movie Head-On was about the complex convergence of immigration and mental health issues between two Turkish-German punks. It’s one of the most violent and romantic movies ever made and also one of the smartest about intersectional …
Paul Mescal has the very rare talent of making unusually good choices. He has made a few damp squibs; nobody loved Carmen but me, and while his charisma carried his stage performance of A Streetcar Named Desire from London to Brooklyn, the whole show was misguided. That said, he has …
Stories about colonization seldom humanize the colonizers, and for good reason. Focusing on the victims of abuse should always be the priority. However, there is value in examining a colonizer’s motivations. In his film The New Boy, writer and director Warwick Thornton examines some of those motivations through the lens of …
The influence of The Zone of Interest is heavy on Two Prosecutors, a story about Stalinist terror that works as well as it does thanks to its discretion. It’s less about the sound design and more the enveloping knowledge of all the horrors out of frame. Anything that tried to …
This loving but very sad movie obeys a stereotype of Spanish cinema by handling a complex issue – in this case, domestic violence – through the eyes of a very small girl. The Spirit of the Beehive handled the Spanish civil war this way, as Summer 1993 handled AIDS and …
Silver Star, a determinedly quirky little movie, is a throwback to the indie cinema of the nineties in the best way. It stands and falls entirely on the actions of two unpredictable people, thrown together through a combination of foolishness and bad decisions, and who stick together through a combination …
The only flaw in the magnificent The Return is that, by virtue of the casting, the audience is able to predict the plot before the characters can. This is however an extremely small complaint in the grand scheme of an unusually subtle and thoughtful war movie. For one thing, it’s …
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 …
From the moment the programme for the London Film Festival was announced, Nickel Boys quickly became one of my most anticipated films of the entire festival. Not only did the film receive positive reviews after its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of August, but its …
Steven McQueen’s latest film, Blitz, marks the director’s return to fiction, after focusing on documentary filmmaking in 2023. Naturally, this comes with a lot of excitement for fans of the director as well as for fans of the historical drama genre. With its period setting and focus on the Second …
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 …
Directed by the Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, Limonov: The Ballad premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where the film competed for the Palme d’Or in May 2024. Serebrennikov also co-wrote the name with Ben Hopkins and Pawel Pawlikowski. The film is based on Limonov, a 2011 book by Emmanuel Carrére …
Author/Vietnamese-American Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a spy novel unlike any other. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book balances many different themes and ideas. Following an unnamed narrator, it tells a story that is equal parts political thriller, romance, and occasional comedy. That helped make the novel a resonatory and powerful piece of …
Acclaimed Indian filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali (Devdas, Black) just ventured into the digital realm with Netflix’s Heeramandi, marking his inaugural digital endeavor. Released on May 1st, the eight-part period drama series is already a hit and has captivated audiences with its lavishness and visual splendor. We recently had the chance to participate in an …
It is likely that 99% of the audience for Manhunt will push play on the first episode knowing roughly how the events play out. Monica Beletsky’s seven-part adaptation uses James L. Swanson’s book of the same name as a rough starting point to chronicle the 12-day search for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators after the …