With 2021’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Alexandre Koberidze established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. While his latest film lacks the playful fabulism of its predecessor, its experiments with sound and light conjure a trance-like, mythic atmosphere that takes viewers not just through Georgia’s sprawling countryside, but into the heart of modernity itself. Centered around a father searching for his not-so-missing daughter, Dry Leaf is a road film...

Monsters as a concept have always been socially constructed, a manifestation of things we can’t, or won’t, understand. In Na Hong-jin’s latest film, his first in a decade, people in a small rural town are surrounded by threats. Billboards remind them that North Korean spies could be anywhere; the threat of communism is constant, so they must stay vigilant. This worldview, where people distrust their neighbors and see the other as something to fear and destroy, is put to the test when aliens...

All TV is, to a certain degree, exploitive—but that goes double for reality TV. With its notorious history of unsafe working conditions, crew abuse, and turning people’s real struggle into entertainment, it’s no wonder the genre exploded in the early 2000s, just as the post-9/11 surveillance state was rising to prominence. One of the earliest drivers of this trend was To Catch a Predator. Because the crimes depicted in this show are so stomach-turning, many worried that Lance Oppenheim would...