Review: “The Zone of Interest”

The following review contains some spoilers for the ending of The Zone of Interest. Any time a filmmaker holds on a shot for a length of time, the audience becomes aware of their role as voyeurs. We’re yanked out of the most likely reason why we’re watching the movie in the first place— to escape, […]

Review: “Bye Bye Tiberias”

Hiam Abbass craved escape. At least, that’s what she remembers. As she rifles through a stack of letters she wrote to her parents shortly after her mother’s passing, she is specifically searching for the one she penned to explain to them why she left home, because she can’t quite recall what she said in it. […]

Review: “Origin”

Origin is about as ambitious an adaptation imaginable. It’s a fitting project for director Ava DuVernay, who—whether working in narrative features or documentaries or television— has always swung for the fences. Her film is based on journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which posits that racism in the United […]

Review: “Mean Girls” (2024)

One afternoon in the middle of December 2018, I hoofed it a good eight blocks across the packed streets of Manhattan as tourists crowded around Rockefeller Center and the department store shop windows to catch a glimpse of the city’s elaborate Christmas decorations to the August Wilson Theatre to watch Mean Girls— not the 2004 […]

Home Video Review: “Fremont”

“Now is a good time to explore.” As the camera moves about the interior of a fortune cookie factory, meditatively observing the employees at work, perfectly in tune to the rhythms of the machinery and the sounds (that obnoxiously noisy crinkle of wrappers), it lands on a small slip of paper with that statement printed […]