Category Archives: Reviews

If mainstream cinema is upheld to the task of democratically representing its viewers then it often fails. So when a film comes out that depicts marginalized figures it’s passed under the kind of scrutiny that a lot of other films … Continue reading →

The five-part documentary series Agnes Varda: From Here to There, directed by the resolute Agnes Varda and released by Cinema Guild, follows the filmmaker as she traverses the globe, meeting with friends, filmmakers (including Chris Marker and Manoel de Oliveira), … Continue reading →

Through the rich collection that is Jonas Mekas’s Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (2016), the reader is presented with the collected writings of Mekas as they were sketched upon the pages of his Village Voice … Continue reading →

Captain Fantastic (Ross, 2016) imagines an intellectual experiment in child-rearing. In it, Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife, Leslie (Trin Miller), have decided to raise their spawn in a remote area of the Pacific Northwest. We enter the story … Continue reading →

Cinema Guild’s latest release of the documentary From Iran: A Separation (2013) explores the intimate significance of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning A Separation (2011) for the people of Iran: its reception, how its accolades confirmed Iran’s presence in contemporary world cinema, … Continue reading →

Stagecoach Criterion DVD Review from Liza Palmer Contributors: Benjamin J. Alexander, Sarah Baylor, Paul Cirigliano, Kelsey Davis, Garrett Farrington, Christian Fulton, R. F. Karmi, Madison Landau, Tyler Linden, Brittany Lowe, and Connor Allen Lummert.

The 1960s brought one of the largest film productions for Polish cinema. Pharaoh (Faraon, 1966), masterfully directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, revolves around the figure of young Ramses XIII (portrayed by Jerzy Zelnik), who is prepared for and eventually succeeds his … Continue reading →

A recurring criticism for the films of Nicolas Winding Refn is that they elevate style over substance. It is resoundingly clear from their neon-drenched aesthetic, minimal dialogue, and meticulously calculated staging that he is a scrupulous perfectionist, sparing nothing in … Continue reading →

  “Open up and let the Devil in,” says an antagonist unaware of the fact that he just summed up his own story in one brooding line… Upon the lukewarm tides of Ben Wheatley’s recent outing, High-Rise (2015), let’s return … Continue reading →

The Witch is not so much horrifying in its visual content as it is in its evocative ability to convincingly bring forth a historic space in which the ideology of the American frontier percolates so violently with the Western concept … Continue reading →