Early on in Land, it begins to feel like first-time feature film director Robin Wright (she also helmed a hefty number of House of Cards episodes) is leaning a little too hard on indie signifiers, like the au courant 1.66:1...
In his new documentary, All Light, Everywhere, director Theo Anthony (Rat Film) invokes an old adage that, “The eye sees only what it looks for and it looks only for that which it has been taught to expect.” It’s a...
It’s a comment both on the singularity of director Rodney Ascher’s vision and on the singularly weird moment in history in which his new film, A Glitch in the Matrix, has emerged to note that it’s unclear how much of...
Sean Ellis first made his name with an insufferably self-satisfied, cutesy/creepy short film called “Cashback” in 2004. Too put off by that effort, I hadn’t checked back in with his work until the new werewolf flick Eight for Silver. In...
Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta is the most Los Angeles-feeling movie that’s not actually set in Los Angeles I’ve ever seen. From the beginning, there’s a running joke about not knowing how to dress for the weather because while it’s not...
Nearly everything about writer/director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s Wild Indian appears intended to be taken more metaphorically than literally. The characters and events are symbols (well drawn and well acted ones). The fact that the Native American children in the...
Starting with its vintage-style title card (the kind where the copyright year appears below the name of the movie), it’s clear that there will be a throwback element to Ben Wheatley’s latest freak-out/horror/comedy In the Earth. It’s got psychedelic visual...
Pascual Sisto’s John and the Hole belongs to a longstanding cinematic tradition, from Rope to Thoroughbreds and with idiosyncratic stops along the way like Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video (one scene of which is almost specifically paid homage to here) of...
In its opening scene, in which two old Hawaiian men swap nostalgic memories while peppering their speech with Pidgin words, Christopher Makoto Yogi’s I Was a Simple Man may bring to mind Steve McQueen’s recent Small Axe anthology, which highlighted...
One of the first things that strikes you about Prado Bailey-Bond’s Censor is that, despite being set in early 1980s U.K. amidst the milieu of the era’s controversial “video nasties,” it could not be mistaken for any of those films...