The animated documentary, by its very definition, is contradictory. Neither form wants to acknowledge the other’s existence because doing so shatters the convenient illusion that…
It’s perhaps too easy to dismiss a film as heavily aestheticized and intentionally non-narrative as Jonathan Rosado’s Matador Bolero for prioritizing style over substance. The…
There are two — or if someone is feeling incredibly ambitious, 101 — films to review in Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma, a cine-documentary exclusively…
Jessie Buckley’s hesitant recitation of Bonedog — the achingly painful poem written by Eva H.D. — is one of the most memorably harrowing sequences in…
There’s an overly edited, scored, and produced version of Sam Abbas’ Europe’s New Faces that would have taken the ongoing awards season by storm. Its…
Silence — like its two unassuming allies, stillness and slowness — is often positioned as a response to mainstream cinema’s reckless noisiness. But contemporary indie…
Water — or, to put it more precisely, the inherent fluidity of it — is a central motif of freedom in all of Lucile Hadžihalilović’s…
Most great cinema centers around The Other — people who, fairly or unfairly, feel out of step with the society around them. Their idiosyncrasies allow…
Grieving in cinema — often perceived as the most painful remembrance of someone whose body you can no longer possess, but whose soul (consciousness, if…
What really is the Circle of Life for people (and animals) not comfortably positioned inside the perfectly calibrated version of Disneyland? Do the laws and…
The film critic’s impulse to champion auteurist extravagance over solid but not showily executed directorial and writerly competency is an understandable one; we live in…
The purest, and arguably most puerile, definition of auteurism necessitates a neat classification of artistic idiosyncrasies. The governing principle behind this approach is to find…
History — personal, political, and its inseparable intertwinement — is, perhaps, most truthfully realized when vividly expressed, not just recorded. Documentarian greats like Ken Burns…
The Final Destination franchise is anything you want it to be. Its six not-so-varied variations of death engaging in a cruelly one-sided game of chess…
How does one definitively characterize a child’s point of view? Is it by positioning it as a response to the stultifying cynicism of adulthood, exemplified…
There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined oppressive…
It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe a…
Contemporary indie cinema may lack in quality, but it absolutely does not lack in the quantity of up-and-coming filmmakers majorly taking inspiration from the grainy…
In this day and age of IP-driven slopbusters, any film that dares to respond to a pre-existing intellectual property is worthy. Responding requires the filmmaker,…
Bollywood-sanctioned social-issue dramas — competently made, left-leaning rebuttals to some of the most incompetently made right-wing propagandist dramas — tend to prioritize fierce rebellion over…
“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power…