Berlinale Review: “Small Things Like These”

It’s probably too pat to say so, but it really is about the small things: the tiniest occurrences that can trigger a memory that can in turn prompt emotions normally kept tucked down deep inside to roil to the surface. Irish writer Claire Keegan’s short story Foster was adapted into a wrenching film directed by […]

Review: “The Taste of Things”

If cooking is one of the most romantic things you can do for another person, then surely Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things is the most sumptuous instance of that action being committed to film. Immediately, Hùng immerses the viewer in the act, not just the preparing and serving of food, but taking us […]

Review: “Argylle”

“This was our song,” a man murmurs to a woman as they tenderly sway to the music across the dance floor. The song in question is “Now and Then,” a “new” song by the “Beatles” that was released in November 2023— nearly two years after principal photography wrapped on Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle. The song, in […]

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 […]

Best Movies of 2023

As 2023 winds down and another banner year for cinema comes to a close, I’m recounting my favorite films released over the last 365 days, from new auteur-driven projects to anime, from romantic comedies to Godzilla. Click the links in the titles to read my full review of each movie where applicable. And thank you […]

Holiday Classics: “And So They Were Married” (1936)

Children scheming to bring their divorced parents back together has become a familiar plot for family comedies, especially with the popularity of The Parent Trap and all its subsequent iterations, but 25 years before Hayley Mills played twins, Edith Fellows and Jackie Moran played rivals trying to keep their parents apart in the breezy 1936 […]