Jordan Blady’s Berlin is a place of halogen lamp glow and cigarette smoke haze. It’s evocative and immersive without being especially flattering to the people captured in his frame. All of which makes it the perfect look and feel for...
I can’t believe we’re still doing the blue and orange thing. It’s been nearly a decade since smart, observant film buffs began taking to the Internet to decry the suffocating trend in digital color grading that made every major studio...
Gaspar Noé’s Climax is a Gaspar Noé movie, by which I mean that it delights in thrilling you as much it does in shocking and upsetting you. Let’s start with the first half of that equation. I’m delighted to report that this...
It wouldn’t come as a surprise if Her Smell, Alex Ross Perry’s movie about the fall and rise of a fictional grunge/punk rock star, eventually comes to be embraced by horror fans. It’s not that it’s scary or supernatural or...
With its palette of crepuscular light, its mounting paranoia and its offbeat sense of humor, there are things about Lee Chang-dong’s masterful new film, Burning, that seem like they wouldn’t be out of place in a late-career entry from David...
To a lot of people, the term “melodrama” carries a bad stench. That’s too bad because not only are so many examples of melodrama legitimate classics, it’s an adaptable format that can still surprise and hit us hard. For example,...
To call Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince a vanity project would be both obvious and an understatement. It’s not just that he’s used his long fought for directorial debut to give himself the role he feels he was meant to...
If you didn’t know beforehand that Thom Fitzgerald’s Splinters was based on a stage play (by Lee-Anne Poole), well, you’d probably be able to guess it. Not only does almost every scene take place in one of two rooms, it also crams...
In recent decades, Iranian cinema has established a strong tradition of movies that take place largely in cars. Abbas Kiarostami made two classics, The Taste of Cherry and Ten. Now Jafar Panahi has a commendable double feature of his own with 2015’s Taxi and the...
