The Film Gang from KSQD

  Midway through Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s latest experiment in Brechtian distancing, a young girl is given a Rorschach test. Within every inkblot, she sees variations of the same thing. Detractors of Anderson’s work can undoubtedly relate to her; one of their main criticisms is that all of his films are more or less the […]

  If Travis Bickle – the antihero Paul Schrader created for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver – had an affair with a horticulturist, their love child might resemble Narvel Roth, the subject of Schrader’s latest film, Master Gardener. Travis and Narvel document their obsessive thoughts in journals, both are products of their violent pasts, and neither […]

Blackberry dramatizes the breathtaking rise and fall of the company behind the innovative communication device.

If you’re a fan of impressive world building done on a spectacular scale, Dune definitely delivers the goods.

  Suspenseful. Funny. Meditative. Disturbing. Mysterious: five adjectives that describe EO, the latest movie from the renowned Polish filmmaker, Jerzy Skolimowski. And yet, it’s challenging to explain how watching EO, which follows a donkey on a journey guided by the hand of man and fate, creates an experience greater than the sum of its parts. […]

Criticisms aside, Olivia Colman’s performance is the tide that lifts all ships.

  A morbidly obese man racked with self-loathing makes a desperate eleventh-hour attempt to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter in the overstuffed but worthwhile drama, The Whale. Brendan Fraser, reshaped by three hundred pounds of prosthetics, stars as Charlie. Charlie’s horrific physical condition isn’t the only thing that makes the titular metaphor so apropos; […]

Not unlike its two central characters, A Love Song speaks softly and honestly and without hyperbolic drama, making this little slice of senior romance a thought-provoking delight.

  An omnipotent being is threatening the multiverse. Who ya gonna call? Spiderman? Dr. Strange? How about a middle-aged Asian-American woman failing as a wife and mother? Her name is Evelyn, and she’s the unlikely hero of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the mind-bending action-comedy written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinerts, collectively […]

To Leslie is the type of film adults would flock to before Disney and superheroes saturated the market. Here’s hoping Andrea Riseborough’s controversial but well deserved Oscar nod inspires lovers of mature cinema to seek it out.

  The final chapter of a British gentleman’s life, numbed by decades of routine drudgery, blossoms with newfound purpose in the Oscar-nominated film, Living. Bill Nighy delivers a towering portrayal of understated pathos as Mr. Williams, the top bureaucrat at a public works office in 1953’s downtown London. As a widower, Mr. Williams lives with […]

Can the world find a solution before the cosmos delivers an Etch-A-Sketch erasure of all life on earth?

Apollo 10 ½ was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2022.

  A group of self-indulgent one-percenters gets their comeuppance in Triangle of Sadness, the schadenfreude comedy written and directed by Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund. Ever since his 2014 international breakout film, Force Majeure, Östlund has been operating at peak artistic powers. With Triangle of Sadness, he earned his second Palme d’Or at the prestigious Cannes […]

  Look within the margins of a Steven Spielberg movie and every so often you’ll see him grappling with the aftereffects of his parent’s failed marriage. It might be Richard Dreyfus as the father who deserts his family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Tom Cruise playing a man estranged from his children […]

  In Martin McDonagh’s eagerly awaited fourth film, The Banshees of Inisherin, there’s a sparsely populated island just off the coast of Ireland known as… Inisherin. The year is 1920, and the islanders are a colorful lot trying to make the best of their uneventful lives. Pádraic, portrayed by Colin Farrell, and his best friend, […]

  Nearly two decades have passed since acclaimed auteur Todd Field released his last film. After his 2001 directorial debut, In the Bedroom, featuring Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson in their award-winning portrayal of a married couple struggling with grief, Field took five years to deliver his acclaimed second feature, Little Children, which exposed the […]

  Earlier this year, Jordan Peele released his third thriller, Nope, a completely unique amalgam of sci-fi, horror, and creature feature. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about Nope this coming award season – it’s that good! In the meantime, if you’re in the Halloween spirit and have a hankering for something spooky, look […]

  On October 30th, 2015, a fire broke out in a popular Bucharest nightclub known as the Colectiv. It was the deadliest fire in Romanian history, killing twenty-six people. In the aftermath of the fire, an additional thirty-seven burn victims died while under hospital care, even though many of them should have survived. So why […]

  Peter Strickland is a British filmmaker with a steadily growing cult following, and with only four features under his belt, he’s established himself as one of the U.K.’s preeminent visual stylists. Strickland’s 2014 film, The Duke of Burgundy, is a relationship drama with a provocative twist and deserves to be discovered by a much […]

  Film editor Alex Camilleri is a Maltese-American who grew up in Minnesota. Beginning at a very young age he dreamt about making a movie that takes place in Malta. His career path lead to collaborations with director Ramin Bahrani, first as an assistant editor for Bahrani’s criminally underseen 2014 film, 99 Homes, then as […]

  There’s something vaguely amusing about the title of the new indie film, Emily the Criminal. It almost sounds like the type of children’s book that Samuel L Jackson might read to his little ones. But Emily the Criminal is nothing if not serious. Aubrey Plaza, best known for comedic roles, is cast against type as […]

  Jordan Peele is one of the most original filmmakers working today. His latest feature, Nope, with a title referenced within the film as shorthand for “No effing way,” is that rare Hollywood beast perilously close to extinction – a summer spectacular that isn’t a sequel or part of a franchise. Peele has a talent […]

  With his 2009 film, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino indulged in familiar pet themes of loyalty, retribution, and skewed moral rectitude. What changed was the genre he chose as his canvas, the World War II movie. But his talent for subverting genre conventions was at its peak. Inglourious Basterds has no battalions or exploding artillery; […]

  Modern zombie flicks began with the 1968 George Romero classic, Night of the Living Dead. Comedies were soon to follow. Minor classics such as The Return of the Living Dead and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive excelled at gross-out humor. But Shaun of The Dead, directed by Edgar Wright and released in 2004, is the […]