6 Best Movies To Watch After TÁR (2022)

Filmmakers and general film enthusiasts worldwide share a deep distress over the slow erosion of theatrical projection and film preservation. Most recently, Martin Scorsese spoke extensively about the state of cinema in a high-profile interview, sparking a round of online arguments. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur of the Film Heritage Foundation has been working to preserve much of India’s old film reels, previously left rotting away in government closets for decades. Restored film prints of previously thought to be lost or incomplete films like Mohammed Reza Aslani’s Chess Game of the Wind and Abel Gance’s La Roue (which plays this year at NYFF) have proven that, with dedicated effort, people can salvage film history.  Continue Reading →

In Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman, we see a young girl meet another in the woods. Soon we learn the latter girl happens to be a literal younger manifestation of the former’s mother. In Charlotte Le Bon’s debut film, Falcon Lake, a pre-pubescent boy falls in love for the first time with the daughter of a family friend in a campsite supposedly haunted by a ghost. Continue Reading →

Babylon is a frenetic crash course in Hollywood history that plays fast and loose with most of its facts. However, it still paints a vivid portrait of Tinseltown from its birth to the behemoth it is today. You won’t find the meticulous and mind-boggling commitment to detail of Mank (most of Margot Robbie’s costuming looks more 2010s than 1920s). Still, director and screenwriter Damien Chazelle is less interested in getting everything right than translating that history into something an audience can feel in their bones. Continue Reading →

For writer/director/star James Morosini, I Love My Dad acts as therapy. The self-reflexive comedy-drama finds Morosini telling a story of a father catfishing his son to get back into his good graces, a true-ish story from his own life. Morosini is joined by Patton Oswalt, playing his pseudo-dad named Chuck, in one of the veteran comedian’s meatier roles of the last decade. Oswalt has the unenviable job of being distant yet hoping to remain close, of playing the roles of Franklin’s (Morosini) online girlfriend and absent father. He performs it with gentle, manic, absurd brilliance.   Continue Reading →

Justin Kurzel’s Nitram rarely features violence. Instead, it’s often subdued in anger, existing in long stretches of loneliness and isolation. The tone follows its lead, played by a phenomenal Caleb Landry Jones. He wanders through a small Australian town without friends or steady way to spend his time outside of fireworks. He exists in a muted state of prolonged sadness, taking enough medication to dampen his emotions. He's unable to make any lasting relationships. Kurzel’s film, based on the 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, simmers towards an inevitable conclusion, constructing and examining the events leading to a tragedy, frightening in its intimacy.   Continue Reading →

Andrea Riseborough and Marc Maron shine in a study of a one-time lottery winner years after her life has gone bust. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival) To Leslie tells a story of painful loss and possible redemption as familiar as the ones recounted in the country songs born out of its West Texas setting. In the case of Michael Morris’s feature debut, familiarity does not breed contempt. What To Leslie lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in terms of its craft and very impressive central performances from Andrea Riseborough and Marc Maron.  Continue Reading →