My review for Cine-File:

What do you do if, for whatever reason, you can’t make the movie you want to make? Perhaps make one about just that. This is what British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton (whose 2021 film THE AFTERLIGHT, made up of hundreds of films from around the world featuring an ethereal cast of actors who are all deceased, notably existed as a singular 35mm print) did when he couldn’t secure the rights for Lyndon Lafferty’s 2012 book The Zodiac…

My review for Cine-File:

French filmmaker Patricia Mazuy’s feature debut, which screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, had an irer in Jacques Rivette—in Claire Denis’ feature-length interview with the filmmaker, JACQUES RIVETTE, LE VEILLEUR (1990), he recounts going to see it twice in two weeks. He says of the evocative final scene that the “first time [he saw it he] almost had that feeling of those scenes that you dream, I often do…

Originally published in the Chicago Reader.

If given the choice to kill his darlings—beloved ideas that may otherwise seem out of place—or embolden them, French enfant terrible Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance, Saint Laurent, Nocturama) will undoubtedly choose the latter. He’ll reinforce whatever he’s trying to get across—or maybe not; he seems little concerned with our understanding of it—with layer upon layer of allusions. The results often challenge what it means truly to comprehend a work of art while allowing…

Originally published on Cine-File.

In my estimation, writer-director Joanna Arnow is a contender for being a modern equivalent to Buster Keaton. Her face is made for cinema, a landscape unto itself even as it’s distinguished by a lack of discernible emotion. Her body, including said visage, is the source of the wry humor that makes her work as discomfiting as it is endearing. Her characters, modeled after and played by Arnow herself, in work she's directing, are painfully average and…