[ The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Lancelot du lac  both begins and ends with scenes of shockingly graphic violence. Two knights clad in cumbersome suits of armor clash on a desolate battlefield, so thoroughly exhausted that they can barely lift their weapons. Finally, one combatant lands a decisive blow, beheading his opponent with one last desperate flail of his sword; the decapitated corpse collapses in a limp heap, gushing blood onto t

Attended the Orphans at MoMA: At Play—Amateurs, Animators, and Avant-Gardes  program at the Museum of Modern Art today. What a delightful celebration of the miracle of film preservation! The showcase (a recurring component of the venue’s annual To Save and Project  festival) revolved around an eclectic grab bag of obscure cinematic oddities: avant-garde  experiments, documentaries, early talkies designed to be viewed in the comfort of one's own home, and much, much more. The

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] All You Need Is Kill  is based on the same novel that inspired 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow  (also marketed under the equally unimaginative—though admittedly accurate—title of Live Die Repeat ), but apart from their shared premise—time loop, aliens, mechanized armor, the many brutal deaths of the protagonist—the two adaptations couldn’t possibly be more different. Whereas the earlier Tom Cruise vehicle is a fa

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] New Group  is a film about the horrors of conformity. The theme of collectivism gone awry is woven into every image. Symmetrical compositions abound, from sprawling grids of suburban homes to neatly arranged rows of desks. High schoolers bow, march, and chant in meticulously practiced unison, drilled ad nauseam  by tyrannical authority figures. And then, of course, there’s the bluntly literal manifestatio

The first thing you need to know about The King and the Mockingbird  is that it is clearly the product of many disparate styles,...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Greek drama is all about inevitability . The classical tragic...

One of the great pleasures of being an insatiably voracious cinephile is venturing off the beaten path of "canonical" classics and...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Kiyoshi Kurosawa is often described as a “J-horror” director, to...

Much like the legendary superhero around whom it revolves, the Menahem Golan-produced adaptation of Captain America  is a relic of a...

If you were to plot all self-starring music biopics on a spectrum, with A Hard Day’s Night  (shameless self-mythologizing) on one end and...

For my final screening of Japan Cuts 2025, I decided to go with the obligatory film about amateur filmmakers—a staple of the festival...

Promised Land  is an appropriate title for Masashi Iijima’s surprisingly mature directorial debut. It is, after all, a film about the...

The documentary has evolved in recent years; films like And Everything Is Going Fine , Tower , and (to a lesser degree) Witches of the...

The Little Girl if Hanoi  is a work of North Vietnamese propaganda. Which isn’t a judgment of the film’s quality, but rather a neutral...

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Orochi  is one of those miracles of film preservation: a...

[ The following review contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] All Shall Be Well  is best classified as a horror film—though not in...

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The Little Girl Who Conquered Time  (also known as The Girl Who...

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Body-swap stories are a dime a dozen in Japanese pop culture...

[ The following review contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Naoko Yamada’s The Colors Within  is a work of sublime subtlety. Unlike...

[ The following review contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] There is a centaur in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea . Not a literal...