In Radha Blank’s witty and winning feature debut, The Forty-Year-Old Version, the writer/director adopts a semiautobiographical persona: a hardworking middle-aged playwright and high school teacher who, between hustles to get her latest play produced and after the death of her artist mother, takes to open mic nights as neophyte rapper RadhaMUSprime. Onstage and in the studio with a handsome beats-supplier-turned-paramour, she raps about aging, ambition and life in New York with all the emotional honesty that’s slowly and painfully being drained from her latest play, a Harlem-set gentrification drama mounted by a patronizing white theater producer.  Scanning Blank’s own biography—she’s […]

Shithouse, Cooper Raiff’s profanely-titled first feature, chronicles an inspired romance between two young souls on disparate higher education voyages. Told with real insight about college-age characters and their flawed relationships, the picture earned 23-year-old Raiff—a softhearted wunderkind who wrote, directed and starred in the film—the Grand Jury Award at this year’s pandemic-impacted SXSW.  Life between dorms and parties doesn’t exactly suit shy freshman Alex Malmquist (Raifff), who’s most comfortable seeking advice from an adorable childhood plush animal he’s brought from home. Though he puts in some effort to adapt to dorm life, he still yearns for the comforting embrace of his protective family. […]

One of the most fascinating things about viewing new movies in the age of COVID is how many of them tap into current anxieties in spite of having been completed before the coronavirus arrived; films as varied in style, budget, and genre as I’m Thinking of Ending Things, She Dies Tomorrow and Tenet all resonate in this historical moment in ways that would have been very different–and probably less effective–if they had been released just a few months earlier. Screenwriter Brian Duffield’s strikingly original and extremely moving teen comedy Spontaneous is the latest film to speak to the persistent unease and […]

Dea Kulumbegashvili should have had the year of her life. At any other moment, the Tbilisi-based writer/director would have already travelled to Cannes, Toronto and San Sebastián to screen her new film for festival audiences. A remarkable accomplishment for anyone, let alone a young director with a first feature, the success of Beginning has instead been a strange, bittersweet ride. In the absence of sold-out screenings and sponsored afterparties, the festival experience in 2020 has given way to far less glamorous rituals: Zoom Q&As, geo-locked streaming links and the solitary act of viewing from home. For Kulumbegashvili, 34, the process […]

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 […]

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 […]