I’m a skeptic by nature. When the blandly attractive heroes and heroines in romcoms talk about “love at first sight” and “true love,” I...

A24’s The Tragedy of Macbeth begins with narration over a blank screen. William Shakespeare’s familiar verse immediately establishes the...

Thanks to the valiant efforts of talented character actors, supporting roles are often far more memorable than any given film’s supposed...

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Two swordsmen stare each other down. Wind howls through the empty...

Masayuki Suo’s Talking the Pictures ends with a quote attributed to director Hiroshi Inagaki: Movies were once silent. But in Japan, they...

[The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] The plot of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car revolves around a...

[The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] A tower of books stacked from floor to ceiling, so perfectly...

Recently, I purchased a ticket for Japan Society’s upcoming screening of Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo, one of only three...

[The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] I am Loki of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose....

When you get right down to it, the most memorable documentaries serve the same basic purpose as narrative films: telling stories,...

[The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] The Gom Jabbar. The doomed Duke Leto’s courageous defiance in the...

[The following essay contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] In Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, ghosts are real. Skeptics may...

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Near the end of the first of the three Rashomon-esque chapters that...

[The following essay contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Despite the clear iconography associated with the character, the...

This weekend, I decided to get into the spirit of the Halloween season by buying a five-movie access pass for Nightstream, a (supposedly)...

[The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] From its mournful reprise of Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the...

[The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] In Bernard Rose’s original Candyman, the eponymous hook-handed...

In my Black Widow review, I argued: The villains, sadly, are far less compelling and memorable, existing only as shallow, generic...

For the majority of its duration, “White Woman’s Instagram”—a song penned by Bo Burnham for Inside, his self-produced Netflix comedy...

Efficient. If I had to choose a single word to describe Paul Schrader’s directorial style, that would be it: Efficient. In his movies...