There was an unusual preoccupation with performance art at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Perhaps this is because performance art is by definition tied to a specific place, people and moment, providing an experience that can never be replicated. On the other hand, in a world where all our moments …
The end credits confirm genAI was used for parts of Titanic Ocean. This is a disgraceful choice by writer-director Konstantina Kotzamani because it insults all the hard work of her cast and crews. This is especially unforgivable because the young actresses had to do a large amount of underwater work …
The oeuvre of Denis Côté is uncomfortable, answerless. His multiple works approach the mundane, the psyche, leaning towards complicated places. Paul, his latest film, is a documentary on a simp, a man who pleasures himself through humiliation from women. Now, he returns to the Locarno Film Festival with an intriguing …
Resident Evil is back again. After the Milla Jovovich-led action flicks, a forgettable trip to Raccoon City in 2021, and the disastrous Netflix series, the video game adaptation returns for a more somber and straight-laced outing. The franchise, which spawned over 30 games, follows survivors of a zombie outbreak triggered …
Before discussing Greenland 2: Migration, it’s best to take this review a step back in time. As in, taking viewers back to 2020, when Greenland was released during the COVID-19 pandemic. Upon release, the film’s core ideology was a Gerard Butler action movie that mostly succeeded. Yet in the pantheon …
The Singaporean director Nelson Yeo is a fascinating new name in the country’s younger generation. In 2023, he presented Dreaming & Dying (Hao jiu bu jian) at the Cineasti del Presente in Locarno. Two years later, he took his shorts Durian, Durian to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Through …
Rwandan filmmaker Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo won the Camera d’Or – the prize for best debut feature in any of the festival’s competition strands – at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Ben’Imana. This is a double achievement as Ben’Imana is also the first Rwandan film ever to compete at Cannes …
How much are you actually supposed to care about a family being hunted by dinosaurs? Normally the answer is simple: just enough to root for them, not so much that a stray death throws the whole experience off balance. David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) spends most of The End of …
I confess I went into The Last House with a strange kind of curiosity that had nothing to do with horror and everything to do with career pivots. Louis Leterrier has spent the better part of two decades making things go fast and loud — muscle cars, magic tricks, superhero …
Seven years after the controversial The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars returns to the big screen with the faint whimper of a broken lightsaber. In the years since the conclusion of the Skywalker saga, Star Wars has continued largely through Disney+ streaming shows. The best of these is Andor by …
It’s wonderful when filmmakers decide they have nothing to lose. If you are going to make an outrageous quest through the kink scene of Paris you might as well hold nothing back. And indeed Jim Queen holds nothing, and I mean NOTHING, back. This is probably why the film is …
I’ll admit I walked into this one with my guard up. Every trailer drop for Spider-Man: Brand New Day — and I avoided them like the plague, though there’s only so much a person can dodge — kept adding another name to an already overstuffed-looking roster: Bruce Banner / Hulk …
Jordan Peele’s third feature film, Nope, was kept a mystery in its marketing and has been slotted into various categories since its release: supernatural horror, science fiction, modern Western, creature feature, and sardonic look at a society obsessed with getting the perfect money-making shot. Nope is all of these in …
Film festivals can be a little too intellectual sometimes. There is of course space in movies for people giving each other lectures on why capitalism is bad (something that featured in an awful lot of films at Cannes this year). But those movies are rarely a good time, and most …
Romantic movies told from the male point of view tend to focus on the guy, especially a guy able to recognise something in a woman – beauty, brains, talent – that she didn’t know she had. Through the guy’s actions the woman is able to get what she deserves, which …
When someone writes, directs and edits their own film, this can be a promising sign of an expert knowing exactly how to deliver the idea they have in their head. It can also be an exercise in the worst kind of self-indulgence, the kind that brooks no feedback and maintains …
One day Zahara’s twin sister Annica walked out the front door and vanished. Not in the “was kidnapped and never seen again” way but in the “walked right out of existence” way. After Annica left the house on April 16th, 1994, the only person in the world who remembers her …
Amara Jones hates angels. You would too if you’d watched them kill countless humans over the past five years without missing a beat. Demons are just as bad, but at least you expect it out of them; they’re from Hell. But Angels are supposed to be the guardians of humanity. …
Surrealism is not my favorite film genre, but I will make a massive exception if it’s in the hands of Boots Riley. Not unlike his debut, Riley’s latest feature, I Love Boosters, is a weird, vibrant, funny, thoughtful, hopeful thesis on collective action and workers’ rights. At a time when …
Everybody enjoys a good “what-if”. It’s a thriving genre of literature and movies alike. And of course, we all do this constantly in our own lives, “What if I hadn’t married him?” “What if I finished college?” “What if I never moved there?” The questions are enough to drive you …