The year is 2008: Web 2.0 is in full force, Motion City Soundtrack is playing on your MySpace page, skateboarding is the epitome of cool, and major advertisers have not yet discovered YouTube. I remember what it was like to be a kid at this time—to feel like you are failing in your social circles […] More
Hummingbirds, a hybrid documentary currently enjoying an ongoing theatrical run in New York City and slated for PBS broadcast July 1, offers up a gentle, verité-style slice-of-its-two-protagonists’-teen, queer, Latinx lives. Those two—Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras—are both the film’s primary subjects and its director-writers, exploring a first-person plural perspective on documentary filmmaking. […] More
The cinema verité-style coming-of-age drama Californie is so naturalistic and arresting one might be forgiven for assuming it a documentary. And that is clearly the intent of documentarians Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman, whose narrative feature drama was over five years in the making. A festival hit on its original 2021 run, winning awards at […] More
Hayao Miyazaki is a god, and if anyone tries to tell you there is a Studio Ghibli film that isn’t worth watching, then I would treat anything they tell you in the future with suspicion. And within its faultless catalogue, one film that stands apart from the others is a finely polished gem called Whisper […] More
A Deep Look at Unsettling Adolescence in Criterion’s French Drama
Warning: Spoilers are coming with us on a holiday to the French seaside. There’s a common fable concerning the best way to boil a frog. According to the fable’s entry in Wikipedia, it’s been used to describe everything from the creeping threat of socialism to climate change. It goes like this: If you throw a […] More
Benjamin Brewer’s (co-writer of Netflix’s 2023 release Reptile) post-apocalyptic thriller Arcadian pays homage to the creature feature genre, taking a surprisingly refreshing approach despite its flaws. The surviving-the-end-of-the-world synopsis is often a tired concept, à la the A Quiet Place franchise. Yet, in the context of a father, Paul (Nicolas Cage), and his two twin […] More
Growing up was full of ups and downs and contained some of the best moments of our lives. Yet the sting of heartbreak, high hopes, and crushed dreams also prevailed. Despite those prolific ups and downs, that time remained one of the most transformational periods as we came into our young adult and adult existence. Everyone […] More
The kids that populate Lawrence Lau’s (aka Lawrence Ah Man) Spacked Out might be charitably characterized as, in social work parlance, at risk, though to say so seems like nothing so much as an understatement. Set in the satellite city of Teun Mun, a place Hong Kong had misguidedly imagined could be a thriving suburb, […] More
Who is the best actor of any given generation? DeNiro or Pacino? DiCaprio or Damon? Is Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis the best ever? The trailer for the upcoming sci-thriller film Foe got me thinking: Wow, Saoirse Ronan has had quite a career the last 16 years. Is she the best actor of her generation? […] More
Ama Gloria, the opening film of the Semaine de la Critiques at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a tender little coming-of-age story from first-time director Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq that bears more than a few superficial similarities to another French film premiering in competition at this year’s festival, Catherine Corsini’s Homecoming. Both films follow nannies struggling […] More
Go Back to China is Emily Ting‘s sophomore feature: a low-stakes, semi-autobiographical account of a hyper-affluent Chinese American woman navigating the turbulent uncertainties of young adulthood. Starring Anna Akana as Sasha Li, the film picks up immediately after our protagonist has graduated from art college with a degree in fashion design. This immediately situates us […] More
In almost—almost—every way, writer-director Owen Kline’s new film Funny Pages is an absolute gem of a coming-of-age tale, a teen boy’s first venture toward independence and adulthood, set in and around the periphery of comic artistry and publishing. Its script is nuanced and earnest, its performances, especially from lead Daniel Zolghadri, impeccable, and its cinematography […] More
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Timothy Stueve
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