Why 2025 was a year rich in films with purgatorial motifs — everything from Oliver Laxe’s Sirât to Alex Ullom’s It Ends — is a…
Despite being so nondescript, the title of The Arab actually communicates quite a lot. In the singular nominative, it reduces a specific man or woman…
So rare is contemporary parlance’s penchant for the optimistic, and so sparse are its vocabularies for the beatific, that Cynthia Beatt’s monumental Heart of Light…
The best mysteries always maintain an air of… well, mystery about them. Propelled by the fear, pain, and panic of having all too many questions…
What happens when an act of resistance evolves from a single event into a living condition? In her debut feature, Why Do I See You…
There’s no one out there making them quite like Alan Mak, for better or worse. One-third of the team behind the Infernal Affairs series, along…
After a long career as an actress, Marijana Janković stepped behind the camera to tell the story on her own terms. Her debut feature Home,…
One of the most impressive first features to debut in 2025 was My Father’s Shadow. Screened for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival,…
Moments in pop music come and go, but none in recent memory have been eulogized quite like brat summer. Within a year, the promotional tail…
There’s a school of thought that would read Pillion’s ending as a positive sentiment, in which a man who blunders his way into the BDSM…
Nightmare’s Advice Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk, along with their frequent collaborator Olivier Godin, represent an alternative stream of Quebecois cinema, one that is…
Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk, along with their frequent collaborator Olivier Godin, represent an alternative stream of Quebecois cinema, one that is both shoestring…
Charlotte Zhang’s docu-fiction of contemporary and prospective Los Angeles, Tycoon, contends with events both real and imagined, intimate and global. In it we follow Lito…
Among all the defenses for art (as if art ever needed defending), the “timeless and universal” argument has the biggest currency. In this argument, human…
Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is a rarity in the West: a film about the Vietnam War told entirely from the perspective of the Viet…
An unsettling drone hums underneath nearly every scene of Juja Dobrachkous’s sophomore film Accept Our Sincere Apologies, a sound signaling that even seemingly innocuous moments…
As the Hong Kong film industry has been devoured by Mainland China, drawing its stars and directors away with the promise of big budgets and…
Poverty and opulence, the pastoral and the high-tech, war and peace, childhood and adulthood. Opposite ends of a variety of spectrums meet, and sometimes clash,…
In his 35mm short documentary Inang Maynila, James J. Robinson explored the textures of girlhood under the tumult of living in martial law in the…
Every threat to a sane and healthy life posed by AI is a continuation of some already existing social and political deterioration. Our societal tipping…
It’s June 1993 in rural Nigeria. Remi and his younger brother Akin (real-life brothers Chibuike Marvelous Egbo and Godwin Egbo) are bickering, eating food and…