Feature
Just getting to join the Directors Guild of America (DGA) several years back was “a huge moment in my career,” recalled Sarah Adina Smith, citing her transition from industry outsider to feeling a sense of belonging. Fast forward to 2024 and this sense of achievement grew in size and scope as...
The films of Ryusuke Hamaguchi unspool with elegant everyday ease and yet anything can happen.
Lives take sudden detours. Seemingly minor characters become primary ones. People are brought together by mysterious connections. There are even, as in the case of his "Asako I & II,"...
The gifts that can be derived from listening are significant--particularly when it comes to music and sound. And in that spirit, SHOOT sought out music and audio professionals to gain insights into their roles, how they’ve evolved, lessons learned from challenging projects, and...
One of the worst movie sins is when a comedy fails to at least match the natural charisma of its stars. Not all actors are capable of being effortlessly witty without a tightly crafted script and some excellent direction and editing. But Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt seem, at least from afar,...
In writer-director-star Joanna Arnow's "The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed," Ann (Arnow), a 30-something New Yorker, lies naked in bed with an older man, Allen (Scott Cohen), with whom she has a yearslong BDSM relationship. She tells him she's grateful he only cares about...
"Challengers" is a bit of a tease. That's what makes it fun.
There is plenty of skin, sweat, close-ups of muscly thighs and smoldering looks of lust and hate in this deliriously over-the-top psychodrama. But get that image of Josh O'Connor, Zendaya and Mike Faist sitting together on the...
Two 11-year-old boys navigate school, friendship, family and change in Minhal Baig's lyrical drama "We Grown Now." It's an evocative memory piece, wistful and honest, and a different kind of portrait of a very infamous place: Chicago's Cabrini-Green public housing development.
And,...
The latest Guy Ritchie flick "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" has a spine of true story to it, even if it does all it can to amplify a long-declassified World War II tale with enough dead Nazis to make "Inglourious Basterds" blush.
The result is a jauntily entertaining film but...
The United States is crumbling in Alex Garland's sharp new film "Civil War," a bellowing and haunting big screen experience. The country has been at war with itself for years by the time we're invited in, through the gaze of a few journalists documenting the chaos on the front lines and chasing...
In so many ways, TJ Ballantyne is a classic Ken Loach hero: a working-class, middle-aged man trying to simply eke out a dignified living, but meeting obstacles at each turn — a victim of unforgiving social realities that leave people like him in the dust.
Like many of these Loach...