Written and directed by Anna Biller (Viva), this pungent feminist parable pays expert homage to and hilariously satirizes grindhouse genres popular in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, notably the occult thriller and softcore porn. The film is so exacting in its loving recreation of the sights and sounds of that era (especially in terms of costume and set design, which Biller literally worked on for years before filming) that one could easily mistake it as actually originating from the period—until…

If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that there is no landscape more wondrous than that of the human face. In a much-remarked upon shot in LISTEN UP PHILIP, Alex Ross Perry’s formidable previous film, the camera held on Elisabeth Moss’s visage in close-up as she silently ran through a gamut of emotions, a single long take that constituted a welcome interlude of radical empathy in a film otherwise deliberately brimming with unpleasantness. In a way, QUEEN OF EARTH,…

The late Chilean director Raul Ruiz’s indispensable book Poetics of Cinema argues against the necessity of “central conflict theory” that has long dominated commercial narrative filmmaking in the western world. If Abbas Kiarostami, one of the world’s greatest living directors, ever wrote a comparable book on film theory, one suspects he might similarly challenge the notion of the “three-act structure.” The Japanese-set Like Someone in Love may well be the Iranian master’s most provocative work; his extremely unconventional handling of…

This masterful experimental film by co-directors Ben Rivers and Ben Russell begins with one of the most incredible images I’ve seen on a cinema screen in some time: an epic panning shot of a Finnish landscape, first from right to left, then from left to right, as the last traces of sunlight disappear from the night sky. As the screen grows increasingly dark, a band of hilly forest becomes nothing more than a thick, black horizontal line separating the midnight…