Plus: ‘Ladies First,’ and a Quentin Tarantino double-bill with ‘True Romance’ and ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.’
Plus: ‘I Love Boosters,’ ‘Sick Puppy,’ ‘The Blood Moon Feast 8,’ and ”Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.’
Dustin Hoffman stars as Lenny Bruce in Bob Fosse’s black-and-white portrayal, also starring Valerie Perrine, all looking sharply uncomfortable in Criterion’s 4K.
Set in Victorian England, Victorian Psycho sees an eccentric governess arrive at a remote gothic manor, where strange happenings stir suspicion that she’s not what she seems.
Some fools call them “lesser” films, but Imprint gives them all the love anyway.
The Canadian National Film Board (NFB) just released Cordell Barker’s darkly whimsical animated 2025 short film on the Artificial Intelligence debate for free on its streaming platform. Good Luck To You All plays like an inversion of Pixar’s Wall-E mixed with The Iron Giant, where a little girl plays with her toys (both casually and roughly). In the background, a televison visualizes out her thoughts on ‘robot friends’ in real time via news excerpts and fantasy. It is a visually complex and kinetic eight minutes, which crams a lot of ideas and narrative into a tight and clever package. It is also in the fine tradition of the NFB offering a platform for philosophical, and even a bit nihilistic, explorations into human nature. I often recommend John Weldon’s To Be,…
Plus three new 4K releases from the Criterion Collection.
Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, Havana Rose Liu, Lior Raz, and Tovah Feldshuh star in director Daniel Roher’s first narrative feature.
Tatiana Maslany stars as a newly-divorced woman with child who gets caught up with blackmail and a murder mystery. Jake Johnson, Jessy Hodges, and Dolly De Leon also star.
We often call those artists, writers, and filmmakers whose work presents a possible future that turns out to be fairly accurate, prescient. But what is more true is that they look at the world around them, the patterns of history, the movement of social and political life, and can make an educated guess at a direction. Shu Lean Cheang’s Fresh Kill is one of those films. There are many genre and subgenre labels that can be attached to it: ecofeminist, ecoterrorism, cyberpunk, noir, thriller, erotica, though Cheang herself used the suffix ‘noia’. At 30 years old, it feels both set in its particular era of a world on the cusp of the world wide web, about to enter a frightening stage of late capitalism dystopia. And that…