In Review Online

A collection of 74 posts

Podcast

In Review On Mic: The Debut

Badlands, No Man's Land, and The Chaser

Chinese Cinema(s)

Take Off

Dialectical materialism is king — or chairman?

Korean Cinema

The World Before

The only assured truth about summer is that it always comes to an end.

Alex Gibney

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie will never be silenced.

Gael García Bernal

Hombre al agua

García Bernal cannibalizes every actor he performs alongside, to the degree that it becomes distracting how multi-dimensional his performance is while everyone around him gets stuck with one-note telenovela roles.

Baltic Cinema

The Way We Are Living: A Conversation with Andrius Blaževičius on How to Divorce During the War

After Latvia became the first Baltic country to win an Academy Award with Flow in 2025, Conan O’Brien joked, “Ball’s in your court, Estonia!” The innocent omission of Lithuania, the region’s most populous country and thus theoretically most likely to actually produce an Oscar-worthy film, left

In Review Online

Insidious: Out of the Further

There is nothing new under the Further’s sun.

Baltic Cinema

How to Divorce During the War

Life moves on even when innocent eyes are met by the angel of history’s glare.

Baltic Cinema

Born in the Jungle

The film’s beautiful animation truly romances with style. It’s just a shame it’s all in service of romanticizing the colonialist European exploration of the Americas.

2026 Cannes Film Festival

Che Guevara: The Last Companions

Isn’t too far removed from any soulless Che Guevara T-shirt that reduces revolutionary politics to marketable heroes of the past.

In Review Online

Desert Warrior

The marketing touts Desert Warrior as the film to finally put Saudi Arabia on the map of global cinephilia. It certainly is the biggest.

Russian cinema

A Russian Winter

Destined for controversy.

Aurora Aksnes

AURORA: What Happened to the Earth?

A boorishly conventional record of the final performance of her multi-year tour.

In Review Online

The Bluff

Pirates, spit, and Frantz Fanon.

In Review Online

Worldbreaker

There is very little in Worldbreaker worth advertising.

Chinese Cinema(s)

Police Story

[Jackie Chan] is an auteur for the masses, the greatest action star in the history of the silver screen, and arguably our greatest global entertainer.

Streaming Wars

People We Meet on Vacation

These two are one Christmas setting away from stumbling onto a full Hallmark set.

Interview

I Want to Speak in My Sovereign Tongue: An Interview with Lav Diaz on Magellan

"Yeah, [Donald Trump] needs to see Magellan."

Korean Cinema

The Great Flood

A half-baked Korean science fiction thriller

Korean Cinema

Good News

Good News’ black comedy cuts with both edges of its katana.

In Review Online

The Threesome

What’s the worst thing that can come from a threesome?

Baltic Cinema

Laguna

Grief can be foreboding like a lagoon; it can simultaneously and contrapuntally be a site for a baptismal-like transformation. Laguna understands this.

Palestinian Cinema

Palestine 36

Perhaps the most comprehensive and valuable narrative drama to survey the origins of Palestinian subjugation in the Levant.

Toronto International Film Festival 2025

Aki

Aki is like a prayer ... beautiful, personal, and uncomfortable all at once.

Screenlife

LifeHack

If Unfriended: Dark Web is Screenlife showing the Internet at its worst, LifeHack, while not unafraid of that darkness, is much more optimistic about its potential.