Bassam Tariq's Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother stages a revisionist Western in the sprawl of Houston, and its argument is that righteousness and violence cannot share a household without one of them giving way. The setup is stark.…
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Na Hong-jin has not made a feature since The Wailing in 2016, and Hope, which NEON opened on 1,560 screens this past Wednesday after a Cannes premiere in May, explains where the decade went. It is the most expensive film ever produced in…
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Joe Swanberg's The Sun Never Sets is built on a gift that is also a trap. Jack (Jake Johnson), a divorced financial advisor in his mid-forties, tells his girlfriend of two years, Wendy (Dakota Fanning), that they should take a break so she…
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Agnieszka Holland read Franz Kafka for decades before she made a film about him, and Franz carries the weight of that reading in a way most literary biopics never attempt. Poland's entry for this year's international feature Oscar,…
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Dylan Meyer's first film as director is a stoner comedy that knows exactly which shelf it belongs on, and spends ninety-nine minutes making sure the shelf knows too. The Wrong Girls puts two broke roommates in possession of an experimental…
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Jane Schoenbrun's third feature invents a 1980s slasher franchise, gives it a dozen sequels and a reputation for misogyny and transphobia, then hands the reboot to a young queer director hired to make the whole thing acceptable again.…
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Kiyoshi Kurosawa has spent three decades letting dread seep through the walls of ordinary rooms, in Cure, in Pulse, in last year's Cloud. The Samurai and the Prisoner, his first period film, adapts Honobu Yonezawa's Naoki Prize-winning…
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Karim Aïnouz's Rosebush Pruning lifts the skeleton of Fists in the Pocket, Marco Bellocchio's 1965 debut about a family consuming itself, and reupholsters it in couture. The screenplay comes from Efthimis Filippou, co-writer of Dogtooth…
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Ross McElwee has filmed his own life for nearly fifty years, and Remake is the film where the practice answers for itself. It began as a lark. Steve Carr, the Hollywood director of Daddy Day Care and Paul Blart: Mall Cop, wanted to remake…
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John Early's directorial debut resurrects a dead form, the disease-of-the-week TV movie, and declines to treat it as a punchline. Early writes, directs, and stars as Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher at a culinary content studio called Gourmaybe…
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Alice Winocour has spent her career filming bodies under duress, from the institutionalized patient of Augustine to the astronaut drilling her physiology toward orbit in Proxima. Couture, set across a single Paris Fashion Week, hands her…
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Mark Jenkin makes films the way a cabinetmaker builds a chair, by his own hand from raw stock to finish, and Rose of Nevada is the most assured object he has turned out. His third feature folds the analog severity of Bait into the genre…
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Madeleine Rotzler, the documentary filmmaker who released her earlier work under the name Madeleine Sackler, has built O Horizon around a premise that would have read as dystopian a decade ago and now reads like a product announcement.…
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Hafsia Herzi built her name in front of the camera, in Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain and a decade of work after. Her third feature as a director adapts Fatima Daas's autofiction novel, and it reaches US theaters through Strand…
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Chie Hayakawa made her name with Plan 75, a dystopia built on one chilling premise: a state program that pays the elderly to die. Her second feature throws the premise away and keeps the conscience. Renoir, which competed for the Palme…
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Eight years after Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley returns with the same prosecutor's instincts and a sharper sense of where the absurdity already lives. I Love Boosters casts Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige as the Velvet Gang,…
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Curry Barker's second feature begins with the architecture of a joke and ends with the architecture of a crime. A shy music-store employee buys a vintage novelty toy that promises one wish. He wishes his coworker would love him more than…
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