Our Hero, Balthazar: Boys Playing Men
Oscar Boyson's darkly comic debut finds two young men searching for connection in an America where even sincerity has become a performance.
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Section
Film
Reviews, criticism and dispatches on international and independent cinema.
The Limits of Seeing
The more Elizabeth Holmes reveals, the harder she becomes to understand.
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Who Gets to Name a Renaissance?
William Greaves’s extraordinary archive shows how history is made not from consensus, but from memory, disagreement, and the people who lived it.
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Primetime and the Cost of Becoming the Story
Robert Pattinson is excellent in a film more compelling in its questions about ambition than in the answers it ultimately gives.
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Coyote vs. Acme Has a Great Case and Nothing to Argue
A brilliant premise, some inspired jokes, and a courtroom comedy that never finds anything worth fighting for.
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Mike Mills and the People We Cannot Resolve
Across three films, Mills finds the ache in loving people whose contradictions we cannot resolve, and whose lives will always escape our expectations.
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Fahrenheit 9/11: When a Documentary Already Knows the Answer
I think the best documentaries end up going places they don't expect, whereas Fahrenheit 9/11 feels methodically calculated from beginning to end
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The Writer in the Kitchen
Tony makes for an entertaining Bourdain biopic, while leaving its sweetest irony unexplored.
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Minding the Gap: The Introvert Behind the Camera
Through three intertwined lives in Rockford, Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap examines how violence and masculinity pass between generations, and how filmmaking can become a way of confronting that inheritance.
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A Life Outside God's Plan
Watching The Last Temptation of Christ with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey on my mind.
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Cannes - 3 Months On
Three months after Cannes, the films that dominated the Croisette are beginning to find their place in the U.S. film landscape.
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After Aftersun
Three years after Charlotte Wells’ watershed debut, a new wave of filmmakers is abandoning the mechanics of the flashback to let memory behave like memory.
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Minotaur: The Coldest Film at Cannes
Andrey Zvyagintsev's Grand Prix winner is a masterclass in precision, restraint and trust.
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