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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This movie season has given us three sensational political thrillers including Jafar Panahi’s battle cry against Iran’s theocratic regime in the Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident andKleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent rebuke of Brazil’s military dictatorship and its power to assassinate the lives and…
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The degree to which Marty Supreme—Josh Safdie’s live-wire tale of American gumption and hustle, starring Timothée Chalamet in a career performance—works for you is likely to depend on how you feel about Chalamet himself. If you plug into the star’s rich commitment to craft, you’ll…
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There will be little middle ground on James Cameron’s thrilling Avatar: Fire and Ash; you’ll either find it richly transporting or, well, expected. Perhaps both. Sure, it’s what you think it is—a battle royale between tall blue beings and colonizing invaders loaded with dazzling…
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Hamnet arrives in theaters with quite a reputation preceding it—that of a movie with such elemental power that it shook fall film festival audiences to their cores, awash in tears. But does the power to make an audience cry—that primal, communal catharsis that movies…
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The exquisite Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s hypnotic, dreamlike portrait of a common American life at the turn of the 20th century, is a lush evocation of a world and man in transition, anchored by a remarkable Joel Edgerton as a Pacific Northwest logger and…
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