Kelly Reichardt's latest demystifies the criminal caper In a time when movies are increasingly loud and boisterous, struggling to capture our ever-shortening attention spans, it’s both refreshing and startling to find quiet, paused films. Yet this has been Kelly Reichardt’s style since her debut River of Grass (1994). She’s subsequently used her meditative and unhurried approach to demystify genres and tropes in Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Certain Women (2016), and First Cow (2019)

Alberto Rodriguez's latest thriller is his best in years The film noir had its height in the mid-century, and shortly revived in the 1970s anti-system surge of independent young filmmakers, where they delivered perhaps the most defining film of the genre: Chinatown (1974). Since then, the genre has fallen off the wayside. Yet over in Spain, the Andalusian filmmaker Alberto Rodriguez has steadily kept the genre alive with a mixture of grittiness and minimalism. His newest is L

Guillemo Del Toro delivers a colorful and defining adaptation of the Mary Shelly novel As much as Netflix is getting blamed for the death of the theatrical experience, the streaming company is giving filmmakers the resources and freedom otherwise denied by studios. This is most apparent with Guillermo Del Toro, the Mexican director has always had a passion for monster movies and fairytales, and when he sought to make his version of Pinocchio (2022), he insisted on it being d

Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s follow-up to Lullaby explores faith and female agency but loses its balance in the debate The struggle with one’s spirituality is a journey that all of us undergo at some point. Most of our questions regarding higher powers and what such faith means regarding one’s own identity often occur in adolescence. Yet, as young people have become less religious over time (albeit there has been an uptick in churchgoing since the pandemic), the expectations of a y

Scott Cooper's take on the Boss is hopelessly shallow and dull The music biopic has such a staid and worn formula that it’s defining parody came out all the way back in the early 2000s with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). Yet we kept receiving bland and formulaic cradle-to-grave biopics up to the populist Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). It was after that Queen biopic that musical biopics began to experiment, Rocketman (2019) delivered a surrealist musical, Better Man (2024)

Luca Guadagnino's latest complicates a rather simple topic Sexual assault on American college campuses is a true epidemic. According to RAINN, 1 in 4 women university students are sexually assaulted in the US. It is a staggering figure that was brilliantly tackled in the documentary The Hunting Ground (2015). Following that documentary came the #MeToo movement, which led to some needed reforms in attitude and discipline of sexual assault attitudes. Yet much of this progress,