Serve and volley: Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a tennis love triangle where the building tension between the players is consistently frustrated by their physical separation—a basic rule of the sport
Wellness check: Nicolas Philibert’s new documentary On the Adamant is the latest in a long line of film portraits of hospitals, including films by Frederick Wiseman, Claire Simon, and others
Raindrops keep falling: Charles Burnett’s long unavailable The Annihilation of Fish is an interracial love story that does not make race and age “problems” to be solved, but treats them as mere facts of existence
Open wide: Mary Helena Clark’s solo show invites us to confront language as an illusion which tricks humanity into conceiving itself as other than animal
Watching the river flow: set in a cold, provincial winter, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest traces the downward spiral of a misanthropic teacher with the Turkish filmmaker’s customary novelistic realism—though with a late formal break new to his oeuvre
Gut check: the latest pair of films from Soi Cheang, a Hong Kong genre master little known in the U.S., demonstrate the sleek blend of existential bleakness and technical wizardry that characterizes his cinema
Perchance to dream: a satire on celebrity and cancel culture, Kristoffer Borgli’s new Nicholas Cage–vehicle, Dream Scenario, treads the thin line between critique and caricature
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