Screen Rats

T he last time Wes Anderson took us on a class trip to the theatre, optional safety glasses and earplugs were provided to all patrons. With his scintillating and archl…

I n 2009 Jessica Hausner presented Lourdes at the Venice Film Festival – a film about the French town which has become a revered sight of pilgrimage for many Catholics…

I n Master Gardener , Paul Schrader continues his late-career cycle of “man in a room” films, about men who carry the sins of a nation, and work towards an increasingl…

W hen you see guys with droopy jaws, immaculate greased side-partings, slightly ill-fitting leather jackets, and a flask of unidentified hooch in the breast pocket, th…

I s there a specific word in film criticism for the kind of realistic drama in which people’s worst nightmares seem to be coming true, and if not, should there be? The…

T he names Banel and Adama echo throughout Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s debut feature like an incantation. Ghostly voices whisper them, a hand scrawls them in a notebook over a…

A dding melodrama to the seemingly endless list of genres he can turn his hand to, Todd Haynes creates a thorny, completely compelling feature from Samy Burch’s acerbi…

S ingaporean director, Anthony Chen, is known for human dramas that pull off their modest narrative ambitions with heart-on-sleeve sincerity. His pandemic project, The…

M ichel Gondry’s protagonists are often dreamers, tinkerers, or otherwise stand-ins for the director; his films frequently reflect on his whirligig, handmade creativit…

D ocumentaries are just as much about the careful withholding and staggering of information as they are about sharing said information itself. This dichotomy stands as…

I sao Yukisada’s Go has three beginnings. The first is a text quote from Shakespeare: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as swe…