It’s 1987 in Oakland, California. The Golden State Warriors are trying to avoid being swept by the Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals, feuding factions…
“Everywhere animals disappear,” wrote art critic John Berger in his seminal book Why Look at Animals? Berger proposed an argument from capitalism, where the industrialized…
Miguel Gomes first began to build attention in the United States with his film Our Beloved Month of August in 2008. Since then, the Portuguese…
Film has always stood in tense relation to history: it both creates and consumes it. Often, it does both simultaneously. Steve Erickson’s book Days Between…
More than ever, questions of form and the constitution of cinema swirl, boundaries challenged or collapsing regularly in a present where visual media is dominated…
Watching the opening credits of Mimi Cave’s Holland, one would not be entirely remiss to recall the barren sound stage of Lars von Trier’s Dogville.…
David Ayer’s movies have often straddled the line between edgelord wannabe grit and cartoonish macho fantasy — although his best films, like WWII tank adventure…
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to find…
If there’s one place in the world you’d want to make your debut, it’s France. Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow opens with a string of company…
The opening shot ofTrương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam depicts two men in enveloping darkness. One carries the other on his back as he trudges…
In an early scene from The Woman in the Yard, a mother walks in on her toddler reading Little Red Riding Hood to a treasured…
Over the past few years, much has been written about the undeniable wave of “Covid films,” narratives molded by lockdowns, themes shaped by isolation, and…
Little Boy In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I…
In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I wanted to…
Quebecois director Denis Côté is something of a cinematic explorer. Over the course of his 25-year career, he has established himself as one of Canada’s…
One often encounters the (admittedly lazy) critical idea that a particular film “would’ve been better as a short,” suggesting that whatever ideas or formal attributes…
In 2014, the Dutch filmmaking duo of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan made a film called Episode of the Sea, collaborating with the…
Whatever else one can say about the merits of experimental film, “it looks expensive” is typically not one of the usual citations. Malena Szlam’s Archipelago…
When Armand Yervant Tufenkian worked as a fire lookout in the forests of Central California, his protracted, expectant gazing into the distance made him wonder…
In Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature, Evidence, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, the conspiracy theory adopts a progressive slant. With Schmitt’s characteristic…