Screen Rats

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…

A t a funeral, a character reads out the deceased’s favourite poem; it’s a blazing, lonely love poem that articulates the private space where passions light up the nig…

I n Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York, America was born on the streets. In his new one, Killers of the Flower Moon, it dies a slow death out there on the p…

O f all the creature comforts in her family’s home, Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) is most proud of the manicured gardens – she shows them off to her mother on a bright s…