"You know how, in therapy, you realize something was the cause of something else? This film was like natural therapy for me. I started thinking, 'What else do I remember about the one-child policy, and how did it affect me?'" Read More
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, a melancholy elegy with a fairy tale at its core, is a work of surprises, from an unconventional structure to stylistic flourishes to a cartoonishly outrageous denouement. Read More
"Based on an actual lie.” That’s how Lulu Wang’s new film The Farewell starts out, before China-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) returns to Changchun as her family prepares to say goodbye to their matriarch Nai Nai, who’s been diagnosed with cancer.
The one catch: Nai Nai doesn’t know she’s sick. Read More
The Chekhovian ideal is embodied perfectly by Too Long at the Fair, a short film that surveys the vast spectrum of human experience—from frustration to joy, hedonism to shame, regret to awestruck nostalgia—and synthesizes the whole mess into just under 15 minutes of precise and specific storytelling. Read More
Although The Terror frequently builds itself around the isolation of its characters, with wide shots of lithic tundras stretching as far as the eye can see, it’s so often about their connection too. Read More
In Room 140, director Priscilla González Sainz supports her subjects with an unobtrusive and subtly compassionate eye, creating a vital work of art and an essential activist document. Read More
Broadcast News presents adulthood as an exercise in weathering the relentless sensation of being not-quite-enough and not-quite-right. Read More
In just under ten minutes of wordless story, Gabrielle Lissot’s Jukai shows us how our hardest-won lessons can become beams of light to illuminate the path forward for one another, and how even as the threads of our trauma form a tangle of sorrow, it’s a tangle that can be organized and reframed into our personal narrative, a story we can make use of to shelter and guide those that come after us. Read More
On The Candidate, All the President's Men, The Post, and Vice. Read More
"It’s a super testosteroney movie—a bunch of men, a lot of violence, the cops are dudes, the guys in the neighborhoods are dudes. But no one was looking at this with empathy, like, “What does it mean to be a human being living in this space?” To me that was a very female gaze, though the movie wasn’t about women." Read More
Night Shift touches the universal, and the divine, in its own small way, and all without ever losing sight of the urinal over its shoulder. Read More
Much of the exhilarating appeal of Artemis Shaw’s short, Aquaculture, lies in its assured harnessing of uncanny dissonances. Read More