A review of Joel Souza’s Crown Vic for The New York Times
Category: reviews & essays
brazil in a black mirror: how “bacurau” turns the western on its head
Directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles explain the eerie prescience of their genre-bending thriller in which the cowboys are the Indians and the Indians are the cowboys.
toronto dispatch: marriage story
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story more compelling as an account not of love, but of its absorption into the language of law
review: monos
Although director Alejandro Landes’s script keeps context to an evocative minimum, the shadow of Colombia’s tentatively concluded civil conflict is unmistakable
open city docs 2019: caballerango
On intimacy, intuition, and “speaking nearby” in Juan Pablo González’s Caballerango and other films.
write what you know
Cheerfully on point, workplace comedy Late Night plays out complex issues with the easy candor of its star, Mindy Kaling
personal effects: ek din pratidin
A blurb on Mrinal Sen’s EK DIN PRATIDIN (NYFF 1980), contributed to a collection of write-ups celebrating Film at Lincoln Center’s 50th Anniversary.
report on “reason”
Fear is not an option: Anand Patwardhan’s essay film traces the pattern of political and sectarian violence across the modern history of India
feeling seen: we need to talk about “us”
Face off: a conversation about Jordan Peele’s Us and issues of horror, race, class, and criticism itself
the perks and perils of self-reflexivity
As a send-up of the postmodern discourse about art, The Plagiarists is hilariously successful. But as a work of art in itself, it feels uninviting and closed off, insulated by its own convictions.
