Miguel Gomes tells the same journey across colonial Asia twice, once as flight and once as pursuit, and the doubling turns out to be the whole argument of the picture.
Barry Levinson's mob drama had a Goodfellas screenwriter, a great cinematographer, and Robert De Niro playing both leads. It grossed 9.6 million dollars. Here is why.
Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or winner is a revenge thriller built on a doubt that can never be cleared, and the doubt is the point.
Netflix reportedly spent around $320 million on The Electric State. The film that came out the other end is the clearest argument yet against frictionless money.
Eli Roth's Borderlands cost a reported $110 million and grossed about $33 million worldwide. The film is bad. The thing that made it a disaster happened in the edit room, three years before release.
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value gives a family house more screen time than most films give their leads, and that decision is the whole argument of the picture.
Alex Ross Perry made four films about Pavement at once and braided them together. The braid should not hold. It holds, and somewhere in the middle it stops being funny and starts being true.
Jia Zhangke built his new film out of twenty-two years of his own discarded footage. The result is the rare picture whose real subject is the time it took to shoot.
Each of the four episodes of Adolescence is a single unbroken take. The constraint is not a stunt. It is the show's whole argument, made in the grammar instead of the dialogue.
Madame Web is a genuinely bad film. It is more interesting as the public death certificate of Sony's plan to build a Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man in it.
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