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One of the most thrilling biographical films to come out of Hollywood in the 2020s, Shaka King’s exhilarating take on a truly remarkable leader within the Black Panther Party—and the young man who would eventually be twisted into betraying him—also provides a respectful, honest space to voice out progressive views that still aren’t fully embraced […]

Often deemed as South Asian John Wick, Monkey Man, of course, has plenty of the stylish action that’s been captivating today’s filmmakers and audiences alike. Dev Patel, now writing and directing alongside leading the film, created a crazy combination of action sequences that mess around with perspective, that’s fuelled by insane choreography, and that take […]

When modern systems like law enforcement and forensics fail to come up with definite answers to a murder, loved ones of the victim usually have no recourse, which is the fear at the heart of Irish horror film Oddity. To lose someone you care about, forever, hurts. So when Darcy takes more strange and esoteric […]

It’s heartbreaking to realize that Happening, a film set in 1960s France tracking a young woman’s journey to dangerously and desperately terminating her pregnancy, is still very much relevant and relatable to this day. Around the world, abortion is still inaccessible, if not completely illegal, and women still struggle to lay full claim to their […]

Shot for only 20 days with a budget of a million dollars, The Last Stop in Yuma County is a small film, but it achieves significant feats, thanks in large part to first-time feature director Francis Galluppi’s strong vision. The set is stylish, the characters feel lived in, and the central mystery—will these robbers get […]

Small Things Like These is the kind of film that doesn’t have a grand resolution, a dramatic climax, or a widespread shift that would change the world forever. What happens might not even change the country, or the town Bill Furlong lives in. But that doesn’t mean the film is unimportant. While Cillian Murphy masterfully […]

On September 5, 1972, at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, Palestinian terrorists held members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in exchange for imprisoned countrymen. The ABC Sports team, led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), despite their lack of preparation, decided to fully pivot from covering sports to news. […]

At the peak of his fame in the 80s, Christopher Reeve was constantly seen as his onscreen character, Superman. Like him, Reeve could fly (planes). He was full of charm and stood for what was right. But in this revealing documentary, we learn the whole truth about Reeve; his troubled childhood, his initial struggles with […]

When Amin sits down for a tell-all interview about his troubling past, his memories come to life in vivid animation. Sometimes they are sweet and intimate, like when he recounts his time as a playful boy in a much freer Afghanistan. But often, they’re marred by the unbelievable horrors of refugee life. Now a successful […]

Many films have tried to decipher the indecipherable bond between mothers and daughters. Lady Bird, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Turning Red, to name a few, center on this particular relationship, which to outsiders may seem strange at best and dysfunctional at worst. How can mothers yell at their daughters one second and coddle […]

In the first few minutes of Mass, hushed tones, solemn movements, and awkwardly averted eyes hint at an unspoken tragedy that haunts everyone in the film. The four main characters discuss it during a sit-down, but even then it remains unspeakable; such is the dedication of first-time full-length director Fran Kranz in depicting the reality […]

Some films struggle to balance style with substance, but Problemista isn’t one of them. It’s brandished with Torres’ unique brand of surrealist aesthetic, which is colorful, freakish, and fun, while also accurately relaying the pains of coming to and making it in America as an outsider. We see Alejandro accept increasingly debasing gigs as he […]

Everything about Sugarcane is arresting, whether it’s the epic shots of the sweeping reservation (“Canada is our land,” one native announces), the emotional moments shared by survivors of the abusive residential schools, or the damning discoveries they find in an investigation into the Catholic priests. Every second of it is sure to shock and infuriate. […]

There’s a pervasive myth in movies that struggle (financial, physical, or otherwise) makes you stronger, but the truth is that struggle makes you weaker. Adversity makes you more resilient and resourceful, sure, but it takes a lot more to be stronger. The Fire Inside, a biopic about American Olympic athlete Ressa Shields, understands that truth, […]

Places evoke certain emotions, but even the most rundown, cramped projects feel special when they’re home. We Grown Now is set in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex, an area that was notorious for its crime and poverty, but to Malik and Eric, it’s a place where they became friends. The friendship they share leads them […]

Be prepared to have the expectations you form after reading Scrapper’s synopsis shattered: though it is about a 12-year-old dealing with grief following her mother’s death, it’s remarkably upbeat. It gets that quality by positioning itself in the buoyant headspace of young Georgie, a resilient, cheeky youngster who retains much of her whimsical childlike spirit […]

You’d need to have a lot of trust in people and in movies to like this one. Ordinary Angels is the true story of how a community came together to help a five-year-old in need of a liver at a time when her father was barely making ends meet, having just recently lost his wife […]

La Chimera is often meandering. Scenes flitter about and move at different paces, resembling dreams more than they do reality, but they’re hardly trivial. Just the opposite, they enchant you with their beauty and confront you with deep, existential questions that haunt you long after the film’s run. You won’t find obvious answers here though, […]

Just based off its title, Mutt is already a film that tackles a state of in-between, and perhaps what makes it already precious is how honest and personal it can get, while remaining a good fictional story. This striking debut took Chilean-Serbian filmmaker Vuk Lungulov-Klotz more than six years to make, at least from the […]

Many movies try to be nostalgic, but few have come as close as Between the Temples. Directed by Nathan Silver, it channels classics like The Graduate, Harold and Maude, and early Woody Allen dramedies without trying too hard. It has the grain, patina, and camera movements of 60s and 70s movies, and its central love […]

Kill Bill meets Bend It Like Beckham in this wild ride about a martial arts-obsessed British-Pakistani teenager who views her older sister’s impending marriage as a catastrophe to be averted at all costs. Aspiring stuntwoman Ria (Priya Kansara) can’t stomach the idea of free-spirited Lena (Ritu Arya) giving up on her creative dreams to marry […]

For public toilet cleaner Hirayama, “enjoy the little things in life” is more than just an adage: it’s a philosophy. Every day, he follows a strict routine of watering his plants, going to work, taking a break at a nearby shrine, and having dinner at his favorite stalls. It seems unexceptional, and yet Hirayama manages […]

There’s a degree of removal in Perpetrator which some viewers may find jarring: most visibly, in the performances, whose heightened sensitivity can seem unlikely for a horror film. That said, director Jennifer Reeder’s main conceit here is to entertain and make you think, and she doesn’t want you to get too comfortable. In the central […]

It’s immediately apparent that there are more carefully made documentaries out there than Remembering Gene Wilder. The film is riddled with pixelated photos for one, and the overall tone is fawning for another. But Wilder is too great of a man to be affected by mediocre filmmaking, and so Remembering Gene Wilder still makes for […]

Is this the most thrilling head-scratcher we’ve seen in a while? No. Is it a rousing take on the feminist cause? Not really. But what Wicked Little Letters lacks in intrigue and relevance, it more than makes up for in entertainment value. Not that anyone needs convincing, but here Colman and Buckley further prove why […]

Many films have been made about that uniquely taut mother-daughter bond, but maybe none is as delicate as Janet Planet. The film, written and directed by playwright and first-time filmmaker Annie Baker, explores that relationship in a way that may jar viewers, initially. The pauses are heavy and long as Baker lingers on mood, expressions, […]

It’s easy to classify Destroy All Neighbors as B-movie schlock; it unabashedly pays tribute to the low-budget comedy horror movies that pervaded the ‘80s. But it also feels too good for that. Elevated by funny bits, easy chemistry, solid production design, and a lightweight but easygoing script, Destroy All Neighbors never really wastes your time. […]

You don’t have to be a theater kid to enjoy this feel-good mockumentary set in a summer camp for junior thespians. While there are plenty of in-jokes here for those who might have spent a summer or two somewhere like AdirondACTS, Theater Camp also good-naturedly lampoons every instantly recognizable stereotype of theater kids and the […]

The Life of Chuck is a life-affirming movie that will have you clutching your chest with gratitude by the time the credits roll. However, it’s also a film whose parts are greater than the sum of its parts. Directed by horror mainstay Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep), the genre-bending film feels […]

Despite the fact that this isn’t the light fantasy romcom it seems to present itself as at the onset, Paging Mr. Darcy nevertheless becomes a breezy, likable little TV movie because it allows its main characters to be adult human beings. The story is still mostly fluff that ends far too abruptly, but for the […]

In The Killer, Director John Woo resurrects his famous 1989 film of the same name but swaps neon-lit Hong Kong for sumptuous Paris, and steel-faced Ah-jong (Chow Yun-fat) for banter-prone Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel). The result is less than stellar, but enjoyable nonetheless. The script feels contrived in some instances (“Never send a man to do […]

For a romantic comedy with a fairy tale premise (a star falls in love with a regular person, and a much older one at that), The Idea of You is surprisingly relevant. It interweaves its romance with discussions of ageism and sexism, making it more self-aware than other movies in the same genre. But with […]

Aptly for a film partly set in a fortune cookie factory, Fremont deals with luck — specifically, the other side of good luck: survivor’s guilt. Donya (played by real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada) is a former translator for the US Army who fled her home city of Kabul on an emergency evacuation flight when […]

The Royal Hotel sees Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) resorting to take up a dire live-in job behind the bar in a remote desert part of Western Australia. Although they’re warned that they’d “have to be okay with a little male attention” in the outcast mining town, their financial precarity overrides the potential […]

Not a lot of people will like Stress Positions, a COVID-era film filled with characters whose ballooning egos make isolation all the more claustrophobic. Critics have used the word “unlikeable” and “obnoxious” to describe them, these mostly queer New Yorkers who populate the decrepit apartments where the film is set in, but if you have […]

Jules’ wacky premise — an extra-terrestrial crash-lands in eccentric widower Milton’s (Ben Kingsley) flowerbeds — is a bit of a misdirection. While the movie is technically a sci-fi (featuring, as it does, some very out-there alien engineering), it’s really a charming, mostly-human drama about the isolation and surreality of aging.  Though the mute presence of […]

After Love is a beautifully powerful and quietly moving outing by emerging British filmmaker Aleem Khan. It follows Mary (Joanna Scanlan), a white Muslim convert who discovers a life-changing secret her husband has managed to keep from her all these years. Without spoiling anything, I will say that After Love is charged with the sort […]

The Apprentice is as much about Roy Cohn as it is about the titular mentee, a very green Donald Trump. It’s Cohn who teaches Trump the dirty tricks and the power moves, and it’s he who instills in him his everlasting entitlement. It’s also Cohn who arguably steals the show. As expected, Strong disappears into […]

Kinds of Kindness is three different short films stacked into one. They don’t share a lot of similarities, except that their characters are played by the same actors, all of whom excellently display varying degrees of isolation and desperation. None of these people are likable—in fact, they’re despicable—but damn if they don’t make you stop […]

Abel Ferrara’s protagonists have always searched for higher meaning in a flawed, messed-up world of pain and violence. If 1992’s Bad Lieutenant took Harvey Keitel to church for one of American indie cinema’s most spectacular endings, Padre Pio doesn’t offer such solace. Ferrara (who’s been living and working in Rome for years now) teamed up […]

Documentaries about people suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s, or other neurodegenerative diseases will always occupy a bit of an uneasy space—how much consent can they really provide in their condition? At what point does presenting their struggles become exploitative? Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory doesn’t entirely assuage these concerns, but it certainly knows better than to […]

As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be […]

Who among us hasn’t committed a white lie to save a relationship? And who among us hasn’t yearned for the full and brutal truth? In You Hurt My Feelings, Nicole Holofcener digs into that paradox and delivers a film that is honest and funny in equal measure. Here, the writer-director doesn’t just use a hilarious […]

George Clooney and Brad Pitt are two of the coolest actors to come out of Hollywood, and this film is a testament to this fact. Watching them, you’ll be reminded of how leading men should be effortlessly funny and charming, but there is such a thing as too cool. Clooney and Pitt are so relaxed […]

If it’s true that to cook is to love, then Dodin and Eugenie must be enraptured by one another. They use the exquisite language of food to express their feelings for one another, and watching their exchange, you can’t help but feel honored, if not embarrassed, to witness such an intimate and love-filled act. Food […]

Renowned British director Ken Loach’s signature traits are present in The Old Oak: simple, humanistic, and unapologetically hopeful. But this time, we see things unfold through the eyes of Turner’s TJ and Ebla Mari’s Yara, whose endearing friendship anchors the film. They prove that seemingly conflicting things can coexist, like workers’ and immigrants’ rights, local […]

On the one hand, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a tense thriller—an excellently set-up heist that makes you wonder, until the end, whether the low-budget operation succeeds or not. On the other hand, it’s a thoughtful rumination on the evil and influence of Big Oil, which despite its relentless destruction of environments and […]

While the market for animation is mostly dominated by American 3D and Japanese anime, once in a while, a film outside the two industries comes up with an entirely new style of its own, with the design inspired by their respective countries. European animation has garnered some interest with Loving Vincent, but Chicken with Linda! […]

The premise of Mars Express may not be novel, especially when films like Blade Runner have already gracefully explored the philosophical ramifications of the human-tech conflict. But the French animated movie’s richly built world, (digitally) hand-drawn characters, genuinely gripping action, and far-reaching ideas about space make it a refreshing watch. The plot is taut and […]

At once intimate and sweeping, A Thousand and One seamlessly weaves Inez’s personal turmoil and familial troubles with the systemic inequality that was rampant in ’90s New York. The hideous faces of gentrification, poverty, and police brutality are constantly appearing in the film, not merely because they lend weight to the story, but because they […]

Strange things are happening in the sleepy cul-de-sac where Cameron Edwin (comic Jim Gaffigan) lives: cars are falling from the sky, space rockets are crash-landing in his backyard, and his doppelgänger has just moved in next door and stolen his job. Unnerved by all these weird occurrences and feeling like a failure in light of […]

When vampires choose not to kill a human, it’s usually played up with so much drama, angst, and maybe a bit of romance. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person on the other hand takes this choice as a comedic one. It may be a tad ludicrous for a vampire to refuse to drink blood on […]

On the one hand, American Fiction is a razor-sharp satire that pokes fun at the hypocrisy of the literary and entertainment industry. It’s only when Monk (Wright), a genius but esoteric writer, decides to pander and give in to what publishers have come to expect from Black authors (that is: trauma porn) that he is […]

It’s hard not to watch The Unknown Country and think of Nomadland: along with similarities in their Terrence Malick-inspired visuals, both films follow lone women seeking catharsis on the road as they grieve profound losses. But Morrisa Maltz’s debut feature is a decidedly lower-key, more spiritual affair — and is all the better for it. […]

It’s not often you get a female perspective on the USSR, much less a female artist with little means. Signe Baumane’s autobiographical My Love Affair With Marriage is one of the few ones, and not only is her story raw and refreshing, it’s also told through lovely animation and musical numbers. The result is something […]

Surreal, off-putting, and extremely disturbing, Infinity Pool plays with the concepts of cloning and the death penalty to craft an examination on colonial tourism. It’s a thematically rich horror film, with hazy neon-lit sex scenes and absolutely terrible behavior, enabled by their wealth and advanced technology that could have been put to better use. Mia […]

The Boy and the Heron isn’t Hayao Miyazaki’s best film, nor is it his most accessible, seeing as the director himself has admitted to getting lost in the world he’s built here. But it is his most personal film to date (apparently he’s out of retirement!) and consequently, it’s one of the most complex Ghibli […]

Bank of Dave is a simple but well-told film that feels utterly satisfying from start to end. Dave is the little guy who only wants to give back to his community, but stopping him from achieving his noble goals are the big guys in suits with vested interests and too narrow a focus to appreciate […]

Fly Me to the Moon is many things: a movie about the power of marketing, the glory of outer space, the beauty of human connection, and famous pretty people doing their thing. But what it isn’t is believable. Nothing about this movie is, except perhaps for Scarlett Johansson’s endearing performance (she’s the only one who […]

The idea of representation in movies is often limited to superficial gestures of putting on screen people who look a certain way. Kokomo City is a reminder of cinema’s possibilities when one really tries to queer filmmaking itself, with genuine queer voices driving a production. This documentary is messy and incredibly playful in its style—in […]