Josh Kupecki

Stearns’ film is less interested in examining the complexities of our duality than it is with displaying our societal follies with an irony and disaffection that is Stearns’ trademark. When Dual’s clone confrontation lands on its O. Henry finale, it’s both inevitable and satisfying, another darkly comic deposition to add to the archive.

DeLillo’s style, a mismatch of tonal understatement and the absurdity of an event, is basically the de rigueur of contemporary comedy, and Baumbach harnesses that style to great effect for much of his adaptation.

Radical may hit all the requisite narrative arcs, but it does so with a level of nuance and examination that other films of this type either gloss over or ignore entirely.

Carnahan and co-conspirators Kurt McLeod and Mark Williams are clearly having a blast orchestrating this symphony of Grand Guignol.

If you are unfamiliar with Dupieux’s cinema of meta shenanigans, Keep an Eye Out serves as a solid starting point. For those already indoctrinated, it’s another welcome dispatch from cinema’s premier purveyor of perplexing paradoxes.

It is a considerable amount of material to shape a narrative from, and Dosa and her editors artfully interlace their dangerous and often life-threatening adventures with letters and diary entries that reveal the couple’s more intimate bonds, enriched by a Francocentric soundtrack and subdued narration by Miranda July. What emerges is a portrait of two people who were equally and obsessively single-minded in their life’s pursuit.

To its credit, the film never feels like a patchwork, but rather a cohesive whole. Or to be more specific: a haunting and meditative yet often hilarious cohesive whole.

A sex-positive comedy that has a wit and a bite that are undeniable even though it at times traffics in traditional rom-com conventions.

A standard setup for a horror film, but filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (who, among other projects, was ringleader/executive producer for the equally slippery SXSW 2016 feature collective:unconscious) has not made a horror film, but a fractured portrait of teenage malaise, of deceptions (both of self and others), and of the awkward probing of a cocoon’s inner shell.

While some of the re-creations of clandestine meetings and shots of faceless men transporting the painting can be a bit cloak-and-dagger cheesy, that’s the only stumble in a film that tells a strange tale populated by a cast of eccentric and dangerous characters.

The film is so alive, so joyous and raucous at times, that the empathy you feel for these characters is all the more poignant and the catharsis is well earned. This is a film you fall into, like an embrace you wish two sisters would hold, but one that the world denies them.

There are no easy answers in The Territory, just a plea for awareness, for intervention.

The director is notorious for not having a working script, writing the day’s scenes the morning of, and improvising at any given moment. The internet tells me that this film was shot in two weeks, and while Hong’s off-the-cuff style seems restless at times, it coagulates like a small scab that never quite stops itching.

It is a brilliant high-wire act. Yoaz is utterly unpredictable at any given moment, and so too, is Synonyms.

As he did with his previous doc, 2018’s John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, Faraut finds and obsesses over the rhythm of bodies in motion, using repetition and cross-cuts of the team’s training footage and gameplay with anime sequences and textile manufacturing. These collisions, set to music from Portishead and Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, are the heart of Witches, hypnotic patterns of serene velocity.

The film, for all its archness and theatricality, is essentially a warm and welcome love story of two people, navigating a world that really doesn’t know what to do with them. It’s new. It’s old. It’s the same old tale of love versus oppression, but through the wonderful performances and the gloriously erudite script, Wild Nights hums along in the manner of the best of Dickinson’s work. This film is alive.

Last and Future Men is a haunting film of melancholic beauty, but hidden within are stubbornly persistent elements of hope.

The film ostensibly is about bees and honey and how that affects these families' lives and income, but what really hits home is a broader impact of humanity (in all its messy glory), and a document of so many things: grief, loss, happiness, and joy.

This is Woodard’s show, and her Bernadine is mesmerizing as she navigates her life of meting out justice while grappling with the price of it.

An unsettling feeling hums through the film, and remains well after. Less of a jolt, then; call it a sustained current.

She Is Conann is a politically charged, blood-, sex-, and tears-soaked sword, carving through the helpless arteries to the heart of cinematic mediocrity, and it is Mandico’s strongest vision yet.

Watching Matt and Anna discover the parameters of their friendship, and the impact they have on each other’s lives, is quite rewarding. Both Helms and Harrison nail the fluid nature of the tonal shifts as their bond tightens, loosens, and tightens once more.

Part of the brilliance of Cummings’ performance is how he can turn on a dime, baring his soul one second and throwing off a well-timed jab in the same breath. Thankfully, the actors around him are able to keep up with his pace.

I would not recommend this film to everyone, but those seeking a poignant satire on art will be continuously rewarded, as the film seeks, over and over, to grapple (in often wondrous ways), with what it means to live.

The film, anchored by interviews with Moreno and her co-stars and contemporaries, positions Moreno as a trailblazer, a barrier-breaker, and a role model, but more interestingly, it ultimately tracks a journey of self discovery.

Franco brooks no quarter in New Order, and the businesslike tone and lean economy of the film make for an incredibly unsettling experience. He also layers the film with an ambiguity that keeps the viewer off balance.

The film animates a number of Escher’s creations, smoothly explaining his methodologies.

Shot in black and white with some quirky wipe transitions thrown in (haven’t seen the classic page-turning wipe in a while), El Planeta orbits around an aesthetic and sensibility rooted in Eighties indie films. But mother and daughter have a comfortable chemistry that surpasses the deadpan material.