Building a Mask: Luis Ortega on Kill the Jockey

By M. Sellers Johnson. How do you through the scenes in life, with what face, with what attitude? It’s really something you can’t choose. You think you can choose but you can’t.” -Luis Ortega From perceptive newcomers like Tomás Gómez Bustillo to internationally regarded directors such as Lucretia Martel and […]

Her Own Star – Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away

A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. Author Christopher McKittrick makes a persuasive case for celebrating the consummate professional Miles became rather than mourning the icon she never was….” It says a lot about the fickleness of celebrity that an actress who has worked with some of the industry’s biggest […]

Practice Makes Progress: Danny Turkiewicz’s Stealing Pulp Fiction

By Jonathan Monovich. Stealing Pulp Fiction leaves Tarantino’s ambitious narrative structure behind. Instead, Turkiewicz embraces a straightforward story without twists, turns, and time warps.” A so-called “thief” of film history, Quentin Tarantino’s style, predicated on the referential, looks to the past for influence. Tarantino has long prided himself for “stealing.” […]

Post-Colonial Capitalistic Landscape: Selections from Cannes 2025

By Ali Moosavi. The difficult, tumultuous relationship between Celine and Margueritte is at the core of Love Letters, while Félix Dufour-Laperrière delivers Death Does Not Exist.“ The films in the main competition section of Cannes Film Festival are the ones that get all the limelight and media coverage. Cannes however […]

Ben Model, Keeping Silent Movies Alive and Well

By Jeremy Carr. I realized that anything I had ever done related to silent film had just sort of handed itself to me, and I leaned into that….” —Ben Model Ben Model loves silent movies. In case it isn’t obvious by his live performances, online videos and podcasts, and the […]

Touching the Past Generation: A Photographic Memory

By Will Comerford. The blurring of perspectives in this personal documentary reinforces how much mother and daughter are truly occupying similar psychological spaces, despite living in different decades and contexts.” Why do we document? Why paint a hunt on a cave wall, or write down what Jesus or Confucius said? […]

Escaping Stereotypes: Ernesto Dìaz Espinoza’s Diablo

By Ken Hall. A well-made low-budget film with characters that escape one-dimensional stereotyping….” An entertaining vehicle for Scott Adkins, Diablo casts him as Kris Chaney, an ex-convict who comes to Bogotá to rescue young Elisa (Alanna De La Rossa) from cartel boss Vicente (Lucho Velasco). Besides graphic and well-choreographed martial arts […]

Images and Conditions: Mohammad Rasoulof on The Seed of the Sacred Fig

By Yun-hua Chen. All the value of images—particularly those from social networks—is deeply tied to the circumstances in which the films are created. A film like this would have been entirely different had it emerged under different conditions.” —Mohammad Rasoulof A gripping and intensely charged drama, The Seed of the […]

A Self-Defeating Genre Mashup: On Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025)

By Thomas M. Puhr. Coogler’s strong character work in the film’s first half undercuts his efforts to embrace pure horror in its second.” Spoiler Alert Ryan Coogler’s knack for bringing a humanist touch to a variety of genres—starting with social realism (Fruitvale Station), transitioning to crowd-pleasing sports sagas (Creed), and […]