I knew Carolina Caroline had left its mark when I couldn’t stop thinking about its title character after my first viewing. On the second screening, I plugged into the rhythms of its central relationship and almost melancholic country-and-western lyricism, and the way star Samara…
I knew Carolina Caroline had left its mark when I couldn’t stop thinking about its title character after my first viewing. On the second screening, I plugged into the rhythms of its central relationship and almost melancholic country-and-western lyricism, and the way star Samara…
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Tuner, an offbeat character study about a troubled young New York piano tuner, is like a keyboard whose ivories are touched too lightly but beg for a more resonant plunk. From director Daniel Rohner, whose 2022 doc Navalny won an Oscar, it’s capably made…
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The most welcome surprise of the 2026 movie year comes in Is God Is, a richly atmospheric tale of vengeance so dripping with attitude and atmosphere it practically oozes off the screen like humidity before a storm. Written and directed by first timer Aleshea…
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In Blue Heron, Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker Sophy Romvari excavates a powerful, semi-autobiographical family history through memory and form. It’s a movie about reconciling childhood and loss through fragments to understand a trauma that, from a child’s view, felt incomprehensible. Only decades later can the full weight…
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If you’re going to make a sequel to a cultural touchstone like 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger’s gossipy roman-a-clef account of the ultimate boss from hell—one Miranda Priestly, an instant icon villainess with a viper’s tongue delivering the most coolly scathing put-downs…
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Bitingly funny and tragic to the core, Our Hero, Balthazar walks a knife’s edge of absurdist social critique and dead serious pathos as the year’s ballsiest, most original movie. From co-writers Oscar Boyson, who also directed, and producer Ricky Camilleri, it’s a bleak provocation…
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Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-handed, modest bit of drama driven by a pair of eminently watchable actors—no more nor less. It’s Soderbergh applying a deceptively low-key style to a few weighty subjects, in the tale of a formerly renowned painter in his…
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The new Faces of Death, a clever, creepy riff on the notorious 1978 shock doc video nasty, is a “meta” consideration of exploitation and clicks, from the mondo VHS legend to the lurid labyrinths of the dark web. But it’s also a smart serial-killer…
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It’s a fairly common assumption that the one thing a man should never ask about is a woman’s past. What good can ever come of it? Not because the woman necessarily has anything to explain or atone for, mind you, but because most men…
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Michel Franco’s Dreams is a sobering statement on power and exploitation, masquerading as a love affair between an affluent American and a Mexican ballet prodigy locked in a game of escalating stakes. Jessica Chastain, in a bold performance, is a calculating San Franciscan arts patron whose…
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