Art and culture take their time essaying perspectives on the past—if the 70s offered a revival of 50s nostalgia (perhaps because the social unrest of the 60s left some longing for the “innocence” of an earlier era), the 80s were a conservative rebuff to…
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A mother and son forge a life in Harlem amidst an ever-changing city in the gritty, moving Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner A Thousand and One, a movie about strugglers, strivers, hard won family love and the spoils of urban gentrification. It is also…
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As a document of a successful artistic union between director and muse, Zach Braff’s A Good Person is an ode to a luminous movie star who has clearly fascinated the talented writer-director, and one who fascinates us. That star is the estimable Florence Pugh—a hot…
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On his fourth directorial outing, actor-writer-filmmaker Zach Braff has crafted a remarkable portrait of friendship and healing between a pair of very unlikely characters, played by an equally unlikely—and very winning—Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman. In A Good Person, Pugh is a New Jersey…
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A burglar specializing in high-end art theft finds himself trapped Inside a Manhattan penthouse in an effective, minimalist meditation on notions of creation and isolation set amidst a brutalist gallery of modern art works. The picture’s opening narration offers a twist on the age-old…
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One of the best slasher films in ages, Scream VI is a surprisingly good thriller that delivers exactly what it intends to—vicious scares, excellent horror set pieces and likable, well-acted characters to buoy the terror. It has been some time since the movies have…
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A unconventional young woman searches for her birth parents in Return to Seoul, an inquisitive essay on the evolving nature of self-identity and actualization. How do we define ourselves? Where do we belong? Can we continually reinvent ourselves? These are the questions posed by…
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Jamie Dack's Sundance winner is a distressing examination of trust, dependency, coercion and, ultimately, exploitation. It is upsetting—and unmissable.…
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A tacitly profound coming-of-age picture featuring one of the best youth performances ever committed to film, the tiny Irish drama The Quiet Girl, the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, is an indisputable masterwork, simple on its face yet possessing an…
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Albert Serra’s haunting post-colonial epic Pacifiction begins and ends with a skiff of French marines arriving, then departing a Tahitian island. Their intentions in this place, eventually revealed across a languorously paced picture with a meticulous insinuation of dread, may or may not be…
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