Gotham Awards Revue: "Familiar Touch"

by Nick Taylor

First, let me express how happy I am that, at least from my filmgoing corner, the Gotham nominations have encouraged more people to watch some of their lower-profile selections. The number of folks I’ve seen log Familiar Touch and Lurker and East of Wall on Letterboxd this past week has been extremely heartening. Hell, I never would’ve prioritized Familiar Touch without Nick Davis’s glowing review, I finally got our own Cláudio Alves to watch it last night, and now everyone who’s going to see it after today will obviously have done so because of me, so trust the power of good word-of-mouth reception! If anything I should have had Sarah Friedland’s film on my radar after she won the Someone to Watch award at the most recent Indie Spirits. Oh, and the three prizes the film won in the Orizzonti selection of last year’s Venice Film Festival.  

Friedland’s clearly got a great pedigree even before factoring in the Best Feature and Breakthrough Director nominations from the Gothams. Luckily for those of us who’ve caught up to Familiar Touch, this adulation is fully deserved, and the crafty, intelligent film is proof enough of her talent . . . .

Click to read more ...

Review: Nia DaCosta reinvents Ibsen with "Hedda"

by Cláudio Alves

You might be excused for believing Nia DaCosta has decided to reinvent Hedda Gabler as some sort of retro-styled procedural when her newfangled Ibsen adaptation opens with the familiar noirish scenario of detectives inquiring about a night of revelry, mystery, and violence. Tessa Thompson certainly looks the part of a midcentury femme fatale, all performative insouciance and bedecked in the glamour of a 1950s dressing gown, demure enough to look appropriate yet belying an informality that could read as indecent. It's all a show with Hedda as the director, playwright, and star. Indeed, she's so luminous it's like staring straight at the sun and flirting with blindness. She's the dawn of a new day, and those around her are night, perishing by her light…

Click to read more ...

Review: Reichardt takes on the heist movie in "The Mastermind"

by Cláudio Alves

Many of contemporary cinema's most celebrated auteurs have recently chosen to exercise their comedic muscles. Park Chan-wook leans on farcicalness and cartoon-like mugging as he's never done before in No Other Choice, while even something as palpably angry as Jafar Panahi's It Was Just An Accident often moves in the way of screwball escalation. One Battle After Another is as harrowing as it is hilarious, and the same could be said of The Secret Agent. Down in the arthouse weeds, we can find Guiraudie and Kurosawa probing the limits of absurdity. Marco Berger lovingly contemplates the romcom while, in the mainstream, Celine Song tries to subvert it. Pálmason is off in his own world, somehow turning child maiming into comedy gold in The Love That Remains. 

Which leads us to The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt's take on a heist movie, starring the ever-fumbling and disheveled Josh O'Connor performing another rendition of the pathetic loser blues he's been perfecting for the best part of the last decade. Hardly a laugh riot in the traditional sense, I'd still call it one of 2025's funniest flicks…

Click to read more ...

Review: "Riefenstahl" confronts a singular, disgraceful director

by Nick Taylor

We will never escape the discourse of whether it is possible to separate an artwork from the artist who created it. Death of the author, authorial intent, auteur theory vs collaboration, wider social contexts in which a work exists, so on and so forth. I state this as a fact above all else. We do love interviews and essays where someone talks about how they funnelled their passions and lived experiences into something magnificent. Frankly, I find it annoying only insofar as it feels like we’re asked to do this when someone’s got something very shitty going on offscreen, but even at its best, conflate an artist with their entire past can be a simple shortcut to dogpiling an object rather than meaningfully engaging with it. 

Which brings us to Leni Riefenstahl, a hideously controversial and influential director forever famous as the woman behind Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. She’s also the subject of Andres Veiel’s documentary Riefenstahl, which premiered to great acclaim at last year’s Venice Film Festival and is waiting for you to rent it right now . . . .

Click to read more ...

TIFF 50: To be or not to be, with "Hamlet" and "Scarlet"

by Cláudio Alves

You thought you were free of TIFF coverage? Well, think again, because there are still a lot of movies to discuss, even if already intertwined with NYFF reviews. In any case, let's consider Shakespeate and a certain prince of Denmark.

There lived and died a Hamnet before Hamlet came to be on the page, on the stage, and in the imagination of countless folks stretching from the Elizabethan age into eternity. At TIFF 50, however, Aneil Karia's Hamlet screened before Zhao's Hamnet, a bit overshadowed by the film that had already rocked Telluride by that point and still promises to be a talking point for months to come. The same could be said for Scarlet, Mamoru Hosoda's latest animated fantasy, which takes its cues from the Bard's tragedy for one wild ride into purgatory and beyond…

Click to read more ...