My expectations for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt were, I confess, moderate, but they leaned toward cautious optimism. I like most of his films, with Challengers being my favorite, and I generally admire his work, even if I don’t consider myself an unconditional fan. However, the initial reception of this …
There is a fascinating new trend in cinema gathering steam: action movies with hardly any dialogue. Finland’s Sisu from 2022 shows Nazis being slaughtered without saying much about it, while America’s No One Will Save You from 2023 has a young woman fighting off an alien attack. And now Detroit …
The formula established in Knives Out and Glass Onion has been changed in Wake Up Dead Man. The series of good old-fashioned murder mysteries solved by gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has been a roaring success because they were mostly about fabulously wealthy people being held to account. Tweaking the …
Jude Law’s first appearance as Vladimir Putin is so eerily accurate the Venice Film Festival audience around me laughed in surprise. Who would have thought he could do it? Well congratulations to director Olivier Assayas and his casting director Antoinette Boulat, because the performance Mr. Law gives here is one …
We don’t choose our family. Love them, hate them, they are our families, and we are stuck with them. Some of us are blessed with living, supportive ones; others not so much, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Black Rabbit is a story of brothers who fall somewhere in …
Comedian Mae Martin’s (Feel Good) first venture into drama is a confused exploration of a dysfunctional town with a mysterious school. What has the potential to be a Lynchian mystery falls flat as it struggles to combine two perspectives. Told through two separate viewpoints, Wayward follows cop Alex Dempsey (Martin) …
Of all the hype bubbles that form around the first reactions to a new release, One Battle After Another generated some of the most effusive of this century. And I mean that almost literally, since many of those reactions contained the pull-quote-ready taglines that marketing departments love so much — …
The Cut, starring Orlando Bloom, is an intense film about all the psychological drama that goes on behind the scenes of a boxer determined to make weight and redeem himself. It’s gritty and massively thrilling and one of the most interesting films of the past year. That’s why I was …
Ron Howard is one of the most prolific directors working today. His films, like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, have stood the test of time. Whereas even with those winners, Howard has delivered misfires like In The Heart of The Sea and Hillbilly Elegy. It’s a varied career that, …
No deer longs for the hunter’s arrow, and no art designed to maintain the status quo is ever as good as it thinks it is. Say what you will about Luca Guadagnino, he has made three solid movies in the last eighteen months, a level of career output rarely seen since …
Juror #2 could not have come out at a stranger time in world events towards the end of 2024. As a director, Clint Eastwood’s interests have been captured by the contradictions of life and justice in the United States: there are often clear-cut guilty and innocent parties, but who prevails …
Nicholas Hoult had a theme in 2024. The Order, director Justin Kurzel’s latest dramatic feature based on true events, puts his character in a very similar situation as in Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2. Both Bob Mathews (The Order) and Justin Kemp (Juror #2) are morally compromised men making bad (desperate, …
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 …
Toronto-based filmmaker Grace Glowicki is no stranger to the bizarre. Recently she, along with husband Ben Petrie, starred in the schlocky, romantic gothic horror Honey Bunch which premiered at Berlin in 2025. Her feature debut, Tito, was an offbeat comedy where she herself played an agoraphobic man whose world is …
A movie can be bad and a wildly entertaining watch, as is the case here War 2. The fight scenes are so impossible that the opening night audience was laughing at them, and yet we were all riveted in our seats delighting at how each pow-bam-boom spectacle kept upping the …
When Night Always Comes opens with news reports and radio shows hammering the housing crisis – wages too low to cover rent and basic expenses, evictions looming – the promise is clear: a direct plunge into a reality that pushes people to the edge. As the protagonist heads out to …
When Nobody (2021) premiered, it was received as a sort of distant cousin to John Wick, but with its own identity rooted mainly in the unexpected charisma of Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul) and the spot-on balance between action, violence, and humor. Four years later, the sequel arrives under the …
Dui Shaw, courtesy of Bangladeshi writer-director Nuhash Humayun – who made history as the first filmmaker from Bangladesh to cop an Oscar nomination for the post-apocalyptic short film Moshari (2022), executive produced by horror master Jordan Peele and Sound of Metal star Riz Ahmed – locates grimy, cyclic folklores in …
Every Heavy Thing, the latest feature from prolific indie auteur Mickey Reece which just had its world premiere at Fantasia 2025, is a pulsing technothriller propelled by daring Lynchian experimentations. Essentially, it feels like a standalone Black Mirror episode reckoning with the threat of Big Tech in American suburbs. Mounted …
Chicago-based filmmaker Alex Phillips continues to entrench himself in underground and transgressive cinema with his sophomore feature, Anything That Moves. After 2022’s All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, about people eating and getting high on these slithery creatures, he sought another potentially polarizing idea in the vein of a …