Hammer to Nail

Argentinian director Laura Casabé (The Returned) premiered her latest feature, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (where I reviewed it). Based on two short stories—“Our Lady of the Quarry” and “The Cart”—by author Mariana...

(Photo credit Mike Coppola/Getty Images) After truly independent filmmaker Sean Baker won the freeking Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, he was fast-tracked to Oscar nominations galore! Amazing! Tonight, Baker won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, Editing and Directing...

Michael Angarano is back in the director’s seat for his sophomore feature. Sacramento is a coming-of-age road trip comedy that stars Angarano and Michael Cera as old friends Rickey and Glenn who take an impromptu road trip to the titular...

“You know, you’re Irish, so when I’m saying Dédalus you’re probably thinking Joyce.” It’s early December in Avelino and Arnaud Desplechin isn’t really talking Ulysses. The French director’s latest, Spectateurs!, reintroduces the his own Dédalus: an intrepid cinephile who already...

The 2025 Academy Awards take place on Sunday, March 2, and as always, 15 short films compete across 3 categories—animation, documentary, and live action—for the golden statuette in their respective areas. Every year, I watch all of them and then...

(Check out Don Lewis’s movie review of Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary and Pavement Jed I. Rosenberg’s doc on the early days of the band Pavement. It’s available now to own or stream via Factory 25. Seen it?...

Miguel Gomes, the Portuguese filmmaker behind Tabu, Arabian Nights, and The Tsugua Diaries, is back with a black-and-white-shot odyssey that toggles eras, cultures, and styles. Grand Tour, billed by MUBI as a “melodrama and screwball comedy with a cat-and-mouse chase...

In 2021, zero states banned transgender health care for adolescents. Now in 2024, 24 states ban lifesaving transgender healthcare for adolescents. What happened? Prominent medical experts and organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American...

Stop-motion animation filmmaker Duke Johnson is making his live-action feature debut with The Actor. Johnson, who co-directed the Oscar-nominated Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman (also an executive producer), adapts Donald E. Westlake’s 2010 novel Memory into a visually beguiling film that...

German screenwriter Moritz Binder co-wrote the screenplay for the 2024 film September 5 together with director Tim Fehlbaum and American dialoguist Alex David. I reviewed the movie last fall and put it in my Top 10 for the year. In...