At the age of 64 Dolph Lundgren remains as busy as ever, alternating between Hollywood mega-productions like Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and small-scale action movies like Castle Falls, which he produced, directed, and co-starred in (alongside Scott Adkins). Castle Falls, which opens December 3rd in theaters, on demand and digital, is a compact crime film in which millions of dollars are hidden in a derelict hospital slated for demolition. A prison guard (Lundgren), an ex-MMA fighter (Adkins) and a desperately violent gang converge on the crumbling edifice hoping to strike it rich before everything explodes. I spoke with Lundgren […]

“Jesus was just another soldier, another war casualty — but on who’s side?” That’s military man JJ, played by Ethan Hawke, in voiceover as he walks the COVID-deserted streets of Rome in Abel Ferrara’s new Zeros and Ones. There’s a terrorist plot to blow up the Vatican but JJ’s got a more personal (and possibly intertwined) mission as well: his twin revolutionary brother, Justin (also Hawke), has been captured, and JJ’s nocturnal journey is an attempt to rescue him and possibly find some sort of spiritual salvation along the way. But the above is just the most reductive parsing of […]

Alexandre Koberidze’s camera is caught up in the day-to-day of the locals of Kutaisi, Georgia, before the meet-cute of main characters Giorgi (Georgi Bochorishvili) and Lisa (Ani Karseladze) draws its attention. The camera watches their shoes as they first stumble into each other, recollect their fallen books and dart off in the wrong directions before realizing the mistake, turning around and bumping into each other all over again. When the camera finally pans up to reveal their faces, it places the curse of the “evil eye” on the would-be lovers, who just scheduled their first date together. As a personified […]

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the 1940s to whom he often pays homage, Thurber employs an elegant but invisible style in which an immense amount of effort goes into making his films look effortless. This is particularly true of his latest release, Red Notice, a caper movie of enormous scale that nevertheless remains light on its feet, fast and funny and romantic in the way Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges movies used to be while still delivering […]

Writer, director and actor Matthew Fifer makes his feature debut with Cicada, a very personal urban romance that’s also a perceptive and searching drama about the legacy of childhood abuse. Films that revolve around buried trauma can be overly melodramatic affairs, but Fifer’s Cicada balances painful backstory revelation with the sensuous pulse of the present. His depiction of early-aughts twentysomething Brooklyn romance is alive to the rhythms of the city and understanding of how place as well as economic circumstance frame the ways we connect with one another. Fifer plays Ben, a bisexual who we meet as he’s engaging in […]

William Douglas Street Jr. needed more money and less of a dead-end job. Working for his dad’s alarm installation company, he’d hit a wall. The only lucrative alternative was to deal drugs, but he refused to get wrapped up in that—instead, he became a conman and created his own opportunities after perceiving how arbitrary the barriers to higher-paying jobs and luxuries of high society are. Through his schemes, Street got to live the life of a Time sports journalist, a Chicago surgeon, a Martiniquan exchange student at Yale and many other personas—if only temporarily.  Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street dramatizes […]