Released nearly a decade prior to the landmark ruling of Roe v. Wade, Love with the Proper Stranger is a time capsule to an era where abortions were illegal and performed covertly.
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig entwines the real threats of a brutal theocracy with the fictional story of one family’s struggle under its absolutist rule.
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Cool monsters are expensive. Zeiram skimps on the story to feast on a live-action critter (or three).
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In this third installment of our four-part series on restorations of Wiseman’s older works, we find how Wiseman creates meaningful, memorable, and consistently engaging films that incisively reflect on American government bureaucracies.
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The dilemma of adaptation is whether it is necessary to adapt fully or loosely and whether the intent is to honor or update the material.
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As Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus wrestles with so much lust and colonization, the film’s contemplation of faith gets a little lost in the scrum.
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When Kinds of Kindness is placed in a row with other White Album films, a theme seems to emerge: these are works where the director throws everything at the wall—not to see what sticks and trim the rest, but to make as big a mess as possible.
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Although Saturday Night is marketed as a comedy, it is hardly a laugh-out-loud spectacle: it’s similar to the anxiety-inducing cinema affiliated with the Safdie brothers but with a comedic touch.
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We Live in Time’s strength lies in the acting. Garfield and Pugh elevate the film from a standard tearjerker to a cathartic exploration of the way that love, grief, and memory intersect.
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Of Unknown Origin (1983) is about a man trying to kill a rat. But this clever horror film is really about the lead character’s Ahabian obsession with both his rodent opponent and with his career success.
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Central Park (1989) and Canal Zone (1977), point especially to his knack for keen sound design and editing. Both restorations demonstrate Frederick Wiseman’s deliberate choices for aural transitions and building an immersive and rich soundscape that helps fill out the impressive scope of both projects.
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Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man (2024) just hit theaters and might be as medicinal for you as it was for Schimberg’s protagonist. It is as thought provoking as it is fun and pulls off the difficult task of being original, being a meaningful addition to a conversation and being clear.
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Fresh Kill is a neon-green love letter to what was then the new world of hacktivism, a playful form of civil disobedience attempting to disrupt and infiltrate the technological systems that control modern life by replacing algorithms with abstraction and logic with poetry.
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25 years later, Spice World is still the highest-grossing film of all time by a musical group. This is why the parody film still holds sway over its fans a quarter-century after release.
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Frederick Wiseman's documentaries The Store and Law and Order highlight different stages of sociopolitical change, through plainly depicting his subjects with as little interpretive framework as possible.
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A fanatical community of misogynistic Dutch people, or powerful, skittery, and kind of sexy forest demons? Oh, what a decision for down-on-her luck villager Frieda (Anneke Sluiters, Flikken Rotterdam) to make in Didier Konings’ Witte Wieven.
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From the outset, Get Away perpetually winks at the audience. The comedy comes from a family’s obliviousness to numerous foreboding signifiers of doom, though Frost’s script goes back to that well so much it starts to run dry by the second act.
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With The Substance, Coralie Fargeat goes beyond surface-level depictions of double standards and female rageto not only show flawed, complex women, but also the social conditions shaping their everyday lives.
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Ted Post's The Baby (1973) tells the story of a woman stricken with grief, looking to help an underdeveloped adult man trapped within the warped remains of a nuclear family.
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Based on the short story by John Cheever (1964), The Swimmer (1968) is a surrealist drama that has achieved cult status since its release.
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