Jan Oxenberg was a thorn in the nonfiction establishment’s side long before hybrid doc-making was a thing (or even a term). Case in point: Her feature-length (Sundance ’91) debut Thank You and Good Night, a restoration of which will hit the Criterion Channel this week (along with two of the queer pioneer’s earlier shorts, 1973’s Home Movie and 1975’s A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts, accompanied by a new director’s intro). Though Thank You and Good Night has been described as a “docu-fantasy” it’s also a very real time capsule of sorts. The film takes as its starting point the looming […]

Ever since his 2003 directorial debut Shattered Glass, which told the story of disgraced journalist Stephen Glass and his downfall at The New Republic, Billy Ray has been one of the finest filmmakers we have when it comes to turning recent history into riveting cinema. Breach (about FBI agent turned Russian spy Robert Hanssen) and Ray-scripted films for other directors like Captain Phillips and Richard Jewell are all marked by Ray’s ability to tackle complex subject matter with clarity and concision, making complicated stories accessible without compromising their ambiguities and provocations. Although as both a writer and director Ray has […]

Philippe Garrel is in recognisably a “late” stage of his career as a filmmaker. He has moved past the point of going for broke. His characters, avatars for any given idea he may be preoccupied with, border on the archetypal. The settings are stripped down, reduced to their essence. His concerns, by this stage, are variations on a few basic themes. He is a commanding narrative presence, the authorial space in which he is most free to assert himself idiosyncratically.  With all this in mind, viewers’ mileage may vary. Those of us who take pleasure in the relaxed vibes of […]

Four of the best performances I’ve seen so far this year are all in the same movie, Yuval Adler’s riveting thriller The Secrets We Keep. Noomi Rapace, who also co-produced the film, plays Maja, a Romanian immigrant in post-World War II America who lives a quiet life with her physician husband Lewis (Chris Messina). Their placid existence is upended when Maja becomes convinced that her neighbor Thomas (Joel Kinnaman) is a Nazi who tortured her years before during the war. When Maja kidnaps Thomas and locks him in her basement, the film becomes a morally thorny and extremely suspenseful thriller […]

There was nothing at Berlinale quite like Malmkrog. I say this first with the authority of having seen it almost immediately after my train arrived on the first of what would be ten disappointing days at the 70th edition of the festival. Relative to Malmkrog, the other big directors at the festival mostly played it safe. And having this behemoth—an adaptation of a 1900 Russian text by Vladimir Soloviev entitled War and Christianity: Three Conversations—as the inaugural film of the new Encounters section at the festival was one of the boldest decisions undertaken by the festival’s new artistic team. That the […]

Antebellum, the debut horror/thriller from filmmaking duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, wasn’t initially scheduled to be released this week. Originally slated for a late April theatrical bow, the film’s public exhibition was indefinitely put on hold once the COVID-19 pandemic hit and closed all movie theaters for the foreseeable future. After waiting in the wings for several months, Lionsgate decided to move forward with a North American digital release (opening the film elsewhere theatrically around the globe) and the unintended timing couldn’t be more apt. Antebellum’s much-dissected trailer, portraying an African-American woman (played by Janelle Monáe) enslaved in the […]