Imagine operating on near-dying people every day in the most horrific conditions. Droves of broken bodies arriving at your hospital after mass bombings of civilian…
“There is a hole in the lake where the movies come from” is one of those incredible lines that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp…
Hanna Bergholm’s second feature has had two lives. At its world premiere in the Berlinale competition, Nightborn was generally considered a low point in an…
Harmony Korine gleefully threw genre cinema in the deep fryer with the hitman miasma of Aggro Dr1ft (2023). This year, Nicolas Winding Refn took it…
It’s wise for people in Nordic films to not, under any circumstances, celebrate life events with their family members. Ever since Thomas Vinterberg (re)traumatized hapless…
As they so often do, sixtysomething Bulgarian couple Marina (Tanya Shahova) and Gosha (Ivan Savov) spend their evening in front of the television after a…
Hidden in a nook of the Île d’Yeu cemetery, the grave of Marshal Philippe Pétain has grown into a symbolic site of contention for the…
It makes sense that the era in which movies are constantly dissected, parodied, and memeified through Letterboxd logs, Instagram Reels, and TikTok videos also marked…
As someone whose first airplane experience was a slightly traumatic flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis not long after 9/11, it was a perplexing experience to…
The opening minutes of Kane Parsons’ directorial debut, Backrooms, are as good as old-school found footage horror gets. We’re stuck in the claustrophobic POV of a man…
For the first time in his feature career, Cristian Mungiu has shifted his critical gaze from Romania to its western neighbors. A Cannes luminary par…
Long before Russia commenced its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the winter of 2022, preeminent cineast Andrey Zvyagintsev already saw dark clouds gathering over his…
Sometimes the first shot of a film tells you enough to know you’re in the hands of a great director. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown —…
Surely critics will be quick to note that The Beloved (El ser querido) strongly recalls last year’s Sentimental Value, as Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s seventh feature film…
A great way to insult the Circassian men in Butterfly Jam is to say they’re weak. Even worse is to call them a “pussy.” Somewhat…
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over a decade after the annexation of Crimea, a desire to put the inner…
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, except for Leos Carax’s bizarro musical Annette (2021), the last decade of the Cannes Film Festival has boasted some…
Although cinema is at its best when it gleefully breaks the rules, some operating procedures need to be in place when you embark upon an…
Two things can be true at once — a simple fact of life many folks still struggle to accept. Even with his reputation perpetually tarnished…
If Peter Farrelly acquired any auteurist pretensions after undeservedly winning the Oscar for Best Picture with his insincere race-relations road movie Green Book (2018), he…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…