Film writing; Subscribe to our Substack for our bi-weekly newsletter & exclusive features: https://xitter.cf/t.co/ZJo3nOanLB
New York, NY
Joined February 2009
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'Customarily, hybrid films such as Closure are lauded simply for their hybridity, as if that were a quality in itself. Yet more often than not, Marczak’s formal flourishes prove limiting rather than expansive, strangely drawing attention to the film’s status as a film while neglecting the implications of its filmmaking for those involved. All the more precious are the few instances in which we see Daniel and Marczak himself interact, moments that hint at a much rawer and less varnished film than Closure has set out to be.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'it’s been a rocky old road for Jack Begert’s Junk. Premiering at Sundance 2024 under the title Little Death, the film won the NEXT Innovation Award, but also got a deserved kicking for its use of AI in its animations. It was brought back home, had twenty-odd minutes lopped off, by all accounts the AI’s been cleared out (though looking at the film’s visual effects, its fingerprints are definitely there), and evidently it’s had a name change, presumably as least due in part to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’s slasher villain from earlier in the year — but also, you can assume, to give it a clean run at things for its MUBI release.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Regardless of the language or nationality of the industry, pop musicians are essentially told to fit into the ideal mold: find a sound that makes money and keep it, stay away from trouble, hold the beauty standards instead of transgressing them, don’t get married, and definitely don’t have children. Lisa, one of the four members of the South Korean girl group BLACKPINK, refuses to reduce herself to a monostory. Always Lalisa uses many colors to paint a portrait of its titular star, complicating one of the world’s biggest musicians in the process.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…
'Seydoux delivers the kind of suffering performance she has long perfected across her grand filmography, but the emotional swings on which the film so contagiously depends rarely achieve enough amplitude to land at a productive path. Kreutzer aspires to enter complex rhetorical territory, to peer into the emotional profile of a pedophile against the backdrop of state law, to unmask the picture-perfect families whose home computers harbor thousands of illicit files, and to explore how love can coexist with revulsion. And yet, Gentle Monster falls short of those reaches...' inreviewonline.com/2026/05/1…
In Review Online retweeted
Our Lee Chang-dong retrospective kicks off today @InRO. Become a paid subscriber to read brand-new essays on each of Lee's feature films ahead of the streaming release of Possible Love. First up: Tyler Thier on GREEN FISH (1997). api.omarshehata.me/substack-…
In Review Online retweeted
In case you missed it: My WICKER review for @InRO!
'The gender roles ruling Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s Wicker are meant to be obvious — something the viewer immediately recognizes and knows as true to the world, even without the ability to discern an exact time or place. That foundation allows the real work to begin, and this sophomore feature reveals the filmmaking duo’s central preoccupation: relationships, and how they are shaped by and vulnerable to the outside world. The duo’s follow-up to 2020’s Save Yourselves! also confirms that their dark sense of humor and taste for the absurd isn’t something they’ll shy away from anytime soon. Wicker is, in a word, weird.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
In Review Online retweeted
With the release of "The Faust Bible," this Silent Sunday I have continued my investigation into the height of the great F.W. Murnau and whether or not he was, in fact, a giant.
Read: oldfilmsflicker.substack.com…
In Review Online retweeted
Ahem: on @tender_subject, me, @ThisIsDaveMaher and @gabe_pacheco did a deep dive into Altered States. We talk about getting high, colonialism, the simian monster and the bliss of turning to sand with your lover.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
In Review Online retweeted
Wrote on Karthick Subburaj's best film - one that is rife with all his themes and aesthetics while pushing the boundaries of the masala form - for @InRO 's Tiff coverage. Replugging this for the film's netflix release.
'Karthick Subburaj’s films have been plagued by these very problems, in spite of his earnestness at confronting his cinephilia. An able genre filmmaker who began tackling social themes and subjects from his second film, Jigarthanda (2014), Subburaj has always sought to reconcile the macho forms of the films he loves — an eclectic mix which includes Tamil Masala cinema and dramas, martial arts and Spaghetti Westerns — with weighty themes of caste and patriarchal oppression that strike right at the roots of these very forms.' inreviewonline.com/2026/09/1…
In Review Online retweeted
no other director better understood the abstract/alien quality of the american west like budd boetticher, this lunar dimension later perceived by baudrillard.
'There were 230 puppets photographed on 132 sets across 2,775 shots that make up an over two-hour film, and all that thought and attention to detail translates to the screen with every textured strand of hair, stitch in a child’s knit beanie, deciduous tree leaf, granule of dirt, and owl feather. So it’s a bonus that the movie, removed entirely from its visual majesty, is also quite good.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Karthick Subburaj’s films have been plagued by these very problems, in spite of his earnestness at confronting his cinephilia. An able genre filmmaker who began tackling social themes and subjects from his second film, Jigarthanda (2014), Subburaj has always sought to reconcile the macho forms of the films he loves — an eclectic mix which includes Tamil Masala cinema and dramas, martial arts and Spaghetti Westerns — with weighty themes of caste and patriarchal oppression that strike right at the roots of these very forms.' inreviewonline.com/2026/09/1…
'...this is still an Eleanor Coppola picture through and through. As the first pieces of text in the film assert, Eleanor shot over 80 hours of footage from the set of Marie Antoinette, only beginning to work through it with her daughter some 15 years later. Tragically, she passed away before the project was completed, but the outside intervention of family, friends, and colleagues transforms the resulting film into as much a tribute to Eleanor as it is a tribute to Sofia or Marie Antoinette.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Clayface is doggedly determined to bend its auspicious start into the machinations of a standard-issue origin story. Plot points drift through like ticks on a punch-list: a sob story about Hagen’s childhood here, an inevitable flirtation between Hagen and Corr there. It’s especially insulting under the guise of a genre flick. That Clayface may have swerved from the movie-as-product model that’s fatigued superhero franchises for years was an interesting proposal, if not especially believable. Instead, we’re left with yet another character wrapped, shipped, and ready to appear in future installments.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
'Paweł Pawlikowski, the immaculate king of grim black-and-white Eastern European cinema, has made us wait eight years for a new film. After the exquisite moral excavation of postwar Polish society in Ida and in the now-modern classic Cold War (2018), Fatherland (aka 1949) turns toward the brutal fragmentation of postwar Germany. Yet unlike the mournful romanticism of his earlier work, Pawlikowski adopts an unexpectedly comic tone and narrative compactness, arriving at a moment when his signature reflections feel especially urgent.' inreviewonline.com/2026/05/1…
'The gender roles ruling Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s Wicker are meant to be obvious — something the viewer immediately recognizes and knows as true to the world, even without the ability to discern an exact time or place. That foundation allows the real work to begin, and this sophomore feature reveals the filmmaking duo’s central preoccupation: relationships, and how they are shaped by and vulnerable to the outside world. The duo’s follow-up to 2020’s Save Yourselves! also confirms that their dark sense of humor and taste for the absurd isn’t something they’ll shy away from anytime soon. Wicker is, in a word, weird.' inreviewonline.com/2026/10/2…
In Review Online retweeted
'The idea of the “real” Elizabeth Holmes is a flag that Evans and Fielder, warring totems of professed trust and inherent skepticism, fight desperately to capture. It’s a concept of which Holmes herself is fiercely protective. She takes particular concern with a 2023 New York Times profile that, in response to Hulu’s The Dropout and a potential new biopic, quotes Holmes as saying, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.” Holmes insists that the quote was a fabrication, that she and Evans recorded every conversation with the Times and can prove she never said it. Both the quote and its subsequent denial could well be You Can See Everything’s thesis: Elizabeth Holmes has been rendered — both publicly and internally — an infinitely layered construction of identity, a living dialogue of performance and interpretation that’s dizzied the notion of truth into ephemera.' Christian Craig on the movie of the moment: inreviewonline.com/2026/10/1…
