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In middle school, John Green novels were the quintessential YA diaries in which my friends and I indulged. Ferociously consuming his books and feeding our angst and inflated otherness through Margo Roth Spiegelman and Alaska Young, or pining for the love of Hazel and Augustus, the announcement of an adaptation sent us straight to theaters […]

Sometimes, the revolution is televised. In 1998, an aspiring comedian auditioned for a Japanese TV show that put young people in difficult situations and filmed them for entertainment. By the luck of the draw, he won the chance to pursue fame in the burgeoning realm of reality television. Forced into a studio apartment with no

“You can’t get a head start if you aim for perfection,” a clueless moneyed entrepreneur muses during a video chat with his two shell-shocked subordinates in the new film from writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. In the context of the actual conversation the sentiment is even more inane than it sounds on the face of it. And

Luca Guadagnino directs “Challengers,” a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley. There’s even part of one match

Several enemies of the state are murdered on live TV in a pivotal scene from “Boy Kills World,” a hyper-action movie about a media-addicted killer who wants to avenge his family’s deaths. We don’t know who these TV casualties are or what people think of their deaths, but we do know that their killers are

Most of us don’t like finding them on our windowsills, crawling on our walls, or making thread-y homes of their own in forgotten crevices. They are our foes as much as any unwelcome pest even if they are helpful in keeping out other creepy crawlies. In Sébastien Vanicek’s nightmarish feature debut “Infested,” there are more

I watched “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” on headphones, in my room, trying to stay out of sight while my roommate had a date over. This is, if not the ideal way to experience this film, at least an appropriate one. Joanna Arnow’s second feature is a symphony of ambient

The Cronenberg cinematic family tree adds another branch this week with the directorial debut of Caitlin Cronenberg’s “Humane,” starring Jay Baruchel, Peter Gallagher, and Emily Hampshire. Anyone coming to this film for more of the body horror imagery in the work of David Cronenberg or Brandon Cronenberg should mostly temper expectations of surreal terror. But

Being a fan of the Christian pop duo for KING & COUNTRY or having even the slightest interest in the musical genre probably goes a long way toward making the drama “Unsung Hero” more meaningful. For everyone else, it plays like a blandly well-intentioned tale of triumph over adversity and an earnest celebration of the