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1 week ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Jordan Cronk |Ed Gonzalez
Allan Dwan was one of Hollywood’s most prolific directors, working from the silent era through the golden age of the studio system. The Toronto-born filmmaker made somewhere north of 400 films—many of them woefully obscure, unavailable, or lost—during his career, and in a variety of genres and registers.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
lwlies.com | Jordan Cronk
About Little White Lies Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Clara Bradbury-Rance |David West |Jordan Cronk
British Palestinian drag queen Layla navigates a new relationship with uptight marketing executive Max in Amrou Al-Kadhi’s joyful, nuanced drama. 21 November 2024Amrou Al-Kadhi’s directorial debut Layla is a beautifully observed narrative of love, sex, gender and friendship.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kambole Campbell Festivals |Kambole Campbell |David West |Jordan Cronk
Reviewed from the 2024 Tokyo International Film FestivalMany filmmakers, both in and out of Japan, have sought to challenge the mythos around the samurai caste. The idealised image of the noble, selfless warrior has been met with a raised eyebrow by filmmakers like Kobayashi Masaki, whose classic film Harakiri (1962) decries the honour system of ritual suicide as pointless folly.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David West |Jordan Cronk |Catherine Wheatley
Reviewing Victor Fleming’s now-classic musical upon its original UK release, our critic was full of praise but felt the film skewed towards a grown-up audience. 21 November 2024Spectacular fantasy, adapted from the forty-year-old American best-seller fairy story. Dorothy gets blown away in a cyclone from her home in Kansas where she lives with her uncle and aunt and her pet dog. She finds herself in the land of the midgets, where she is welcomed by Glinda, a beautiful and benevolent witch.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David West |Jordan Cronk |Catherine Wheatley |David WestReviews
A sober exploration of tradition, grief, and mortality The Last Dance is an unexpected change of pace for Anselm Chan Mau-Yin, a director known for the rom coms Ready Or Knot (2021) and Ready Or Rot (2023). Chan’s latest reunites two of the biggest names in Hong Kong comedy with Dayo Wong and Michael Hui working together for the first time since The Magic Touch (1992).
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jordan Cronk |Catherine Wheatley |Miriam Balanescu |Ryan Gilbey
The last film from Tibetan director Pema Tseden takes on a mystical quality as a Chinese television crew arrives in Tibet to report on a farmer who has taken a snow leopard captive for killing his sheep. 19 November 2024When Pema Tseden died suddenly in May 2023, at the age of 53, he left behind a small but crucial body of work that remains too little seen in the west.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
mubi.com | Jordan Cronk
Grand Tour (2024), director Miguel Gomes’s sixth feature and first to play in competition at Cannes, is a return to the globe-trotting style of his pre-pandemic work. In this follow-up to his remarkably resourceful COVID comedy The Tsugua Diaries (2021), which he codirected with his wife and frequent collaborator Maureen Fazendeiro, the Portuguese filmmaker exhibits an equal but opposite kind of inventiveness as he turns a two-page passage from W.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
filmcomment.com | Jordan Cronk
This article appeared in the October 9, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. DIRECT ACTION (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, 2024)In Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s documentary feature DIRECT ACTION, the viewer is dropped into the Notre-Dame-des-Landes commune, one of the most controversial ZAD (Zone à Défendre, or Zone to Defend) communities in France.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
filmcomment.com | Jordan Cronk
This article appeared in the October 4, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024)Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke’s first fiction feature in six years, is among the 54-year-old Chinese director’s most radical and comprehensively conceived works to date.
