Harry Lighton’s debut feature Pillion arrives with unflinching frankness in its love story of sorts rooted in power and control, resisting easy categorization. Both transgressive and oddly tender, Pillion—adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’ acclaimed 2020 novel Box Hill—traces dominance, submission and personal awakening with deft…
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Filmmaker Mona Fastvold’s unconventional The Testament of Ann Lee is a striking origin story of the Shaker religious movement, its titular founder played by Amanda Seyfried in an enigmatic portrait of emotional, physical and spiritual conviction. Set in the mid-1700s, Fastvold’s epic charts the…
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Kleber Mendonça Filho’s films (Aquarius, Bacurau, Pictures of Ghosts) have always resisted easy classification, but The Secret Agent may be his most expansive work yet—a film that moves deftly between political thriller, character study and city symphony without ever announcing its shifts. Set in…
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In Rental Family, Brendan Fraser plays an American ex-pat actor in Tokyo who signs on with an agency that supplies stand-in relatives and companions for hire. For Fraser’s Phillip, whose career in TV commercials has stalled, the job begins as harmless role-playing—until those scripted…
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I recently caught up with writer-director Derek Cianfrance in Chicago on a bright fall afternoon on the eve of the premiere of his surprisingly tender new film, Roofman — a story about an escaped convict whose humanity becomes both his undoing and his redemption.…
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Bing Liu has built a pair of terrific films around the question of how young people come of age when the odds are stacked against them. His Oscar-nominated 2018 doc Minding the Gap charted several years in the lives of three skateboarding friends in…
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In their new film She Rides Shotgun, director Nick Rowland and actor Taron Egerton deliver a tense experience fusing the grit and danger of a crime picture with the vulnerability of a fractured father-daughter relationship. Adapted from the novel by Jordan Harper, the story…
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Ari Aster’s Eddington is unlike anything else this year in its sprawling attempt to reckon with the fractured state of American life in 2020. Set in a fictional town in New Mexico, the film follows a slow-burning conflict between a conservative sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix)…
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Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza didn’t set out to make just another war film. After working together on last year’s provocative button pusher Civil War, their creative partnership evolved when a conversation about potential future collaborations turned into something far more personal. The resulting…
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In their ambitious new novel Disturbing the Bones (Penguin Random House), hit filmmaker Andrew Davis and historian-novelist Jeff Biggers have crafted a high-tech, riveting thriller that interweaves geopolitical thrills and a personal, eras-spanning mystery. This isn’t just a whodunnit; it’s a politically charged race against…
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