Hammer to Nail

There has been no shortage of artistically strong films in 2025, which is why the critics at Hammer to Nail offer up such a great variety of titles in their respective Top 10 lists of the year. Our choices run...

Seymour Hersh has spent six decades doing what few journalists dare: telling the American public what its government desperately wants to keep hidden. From his Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of the Mỹ Lai Massacre in 1969 to his groundbreaking reporting on...

After working together back in 2023 on the heavy, yet tender drama Memory, writer-director Michel Franco and star Jessica Chastain are back with an erotic drama that spans both sides of the US-Mexico border. Dreams, Franco’s ninth feature, stars Chastain...

(Check out Chris Reed’s Little Amélie or the Character of Rain movie review, Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.) Notwithstanding the auteur theory of filmmaking (where the director is prioritized as the primary creative force), all...

Urška Djukić’s Little Trouble Girls (which Chris Reed reviewed here) follows introverted 16-year-old Lucia as she joins her Catholic school’s all-girls choir and befriends Ana-Maria, a popular student. When the choir travels to a countryside convent for a weekend retreat,...

(Here at Hammer to Nail are all about true independent cinema. But we also have to tip our hat to the great films of yesteryear that continue to inspire filmmakers and cinephiles alike. This week Brad Cook submerges himself in...

Coming from a rapturous premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (and the highest rating on Ioncinema’s international critics grid), Sirāt has already been nominated for 2 Golden Globes for best Foreign Language Film and Best Score, and has just advanced...

In October 2021, Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev arrived in Moscow with her iPhone to document Russian independent journalists being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime. At the start of filming she had no idea it would become a five-and-a-half-hour...

Seven years after the international sensation Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a film that climaxed with a breathtaking 59-minute 3D long take, visionary director Bi Gan returns with his most ambitious work yet. Resurrection (reviewed here by M.J. O’Toole) is...

Married directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let the Corpses Tan) are out with a new film, Reflection in a Dead Diamond (which I recently reviewed), which offers espionage and visual delights aplenty. Featuring actors Fabio Testi and Yannick Renier...