Rating: 3.5★
There is a reasonable argument that the two years between 1989 and 1991 represent the single most important stretch in the history of American feature animation. The Little Mermaid had already announced the so-called Disney Renaissance with considerable force, and now the studio followed it with Beauty and the
Rating: 3.5★
Hong Sang-soo has been making films in South Korea since the mid-1990s, and by the time The Woman Who Ran arrived in 2020 he had settled into a mode of working that is essentially his alone: low-budget, shot quickly, built around conversation, and shaped almost entirely by
Rating: 3.5★
Werner Herzog has spent five decades building one of the most singular bodies of work in world cinema, and the through-line connecting nearly all of it is a preoccupation with men who burn themselves up chasing something the rest of us would have the good sense to leave alone.
2020s
The Influencer Project is a smart, unsettling little thriller that understands exactly what it wants to say about the age of the algorithm, and mostly says it very well. It comes from the team behind The Blair Witch Project, and that pedigree shows: this is found footage with a real
Rating: 3.5★
By the early 1990s, Batman: The Animated Series had already done something rather unusual: it had convinced a generation of children, and more than a few adults, that a Saturday-morning cartoon could be genuinely moody, even emotionally serious. The series arrived in 1992 with its own aesthetic language, a
Rating: 3.5★
Michael Mann has spent the better part of four decades making Los Angeles his own particular territory, and Collateral (2004) sits squarely in that tradition. Where Heat spread itself across the city in daylight and shadow over nearly three hours, this film compresses everything into a single night, a single
Rating: 3.5★
H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds in 1898, and the story has never quite left us alone since. Orson Welles sent radio listeners into a panic with his 1938 broadcast adaptation, Byron Haskin put it on screen in 1953, and Jeff Wayne turned it into a prog-
Rating: 3.5★
On 25 February 1964, Cassius Clay, a 22-year-old challenger given little chance by almost anyone, knocked out Sonny Liston in Miami Beach to become heavyweight champion of the world. What happened later that night, away from the cameras and the crowd, is the premise of One Night in
Rating: 3.5★
Brian De Palma arrived at Dressed to Kill in 1980 already well-established as Hollywood's most devoted, and most forensically skilled, student of Alfred Hitchcock. He had spent the previous decade developing a body of work that wore its Hitchcock influences openly, from the split-screen paranoia of
Rating: 3.5★
There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes into Tangerine, where it dawns on you that you are watching something genuinely alive. Not polished, not composed for maximum effect, but actually alive, with all the noise and heat and mess that implies. And then you remember it was shot on a
Rating: 3.5★
Clint Eastwood does not ease you into The Outlaw Josey Wales. It opens with an act of violence so sudden and ugly that you feel it before you've had a chance to brace yourself, and that readiness to start on a gut-punch and make you live in
Country Luxembourg
Child is a film I admired and argued with in almost equal measure. For a good long stretch it is a lean, harrowing moral drama, and then it takes a hard turn into somewhere far stranger, and I came away genuinely torn about whether that swerve was brave or a
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