Review

By Elias Savada. Suburban, hum-drum life turns into a darkly orchestrated example of a revenge….” As Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody takes its first steps, Hutch Mansell is one glum family man, stuck in a middle-age existence as an alternate-universe Walter Mitty, one with a dormant and well-hidden, action-powered past. But a […]

By Elias Savada. No, this isn’t The Big Short, and Margot Robbie is nowhere in sight, but I wonder what the financial world might think of this film.” Is it possible for someone with just $2,000 to ultimately own the world? That’s the most unusual hypothesis behind Leandro and Jonathan […]

Schrader with cinematographer John Bailey on the set of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

By Gary M. Kramer. Keep an Eye Out juggles so many different styles of farcical humor and manipulates the police genre that its few lapses can be forgiven.” French writer/director Quentin Dupieux makes idiosyncratic films that either charm or annoy viewers. Folks who admire the cheekiness of his 2010 breakout […]

By Thomas Puhr. A well-crafted genre exercise…[that] ultimately offers mere glimpses of what made The Canal so strange and surprising. One of the great joys of our streaming era is the discovery – usually after scrolling through dozens of bottom drawer B-movies – of an overlooked horror film: one that […]

By Elias Savada. There is plenty of dark humor to be found in this Israeli-American hybrid from Haifa-born and Los Angeles-based director Michael Mayer…[a] horror excursion into impolite Los Angeles manners….” Don’t let the title fool you. What looks like happiness on the surface ain’t what’s underneath. Nowhere. No how. […]

By Alex Ramon. This modest small-town-set charmer, the debut fiction feature of its director, operates with a stealth subversiveness that proves all the more refreshing.” The biggest splashes in Polish cinema over the turbulent past twelve months have been made by two films: Mariusz Wilczyński’s Berlinale success Kill It and […]

By Ali Moosavi. A praiseworthy debut feature for Armenian director Arman Nshanian.” Songs of Solomon, which is Armenia’s entry for this year’s Foreign Language Oscars, uses the life of the Armenian composer known as Komitas to cover an era of history which includes the Hamidian Massacres of Armenians by the […]

By Yun-hua Chen. Probing deep into the possibilities of filmmaking, Simon Lavoie invites his audience into a trance-like journey….” Slamdance Film Festival, the premiere festival with the mission of “by filmmakers, for filmmakers”, is unique in terms of its democratic programming and precise policy to support independent filmmaking; it focuses […]

By Elias Savada. The combination of hallucinogenic talk radio sketches and Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle on steroids affords actor R. Michael Gull to follow the filmmakers’ urgings: ‘Let’s just make some shit in our basement … and show hate like it really is.’” I’m still trying to wrap my head […]