Our second dispatch from the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival does something a little different from our familiar festival coverage pieces. Below, a trio…
#110: Gamer Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: Apparently we have become the Neveldine/Taylor podcast, as this week, we take on…
In his essential Jerry Lewis essay “The Jerriad: A Clown Painting,” film critic B. Kite discusses the lineage of classic clowns like Chaplin, Keaton,…
The sixth feature film from Pema Tseden is a dream-inflected, almost Rashomon-like take on a road movie that uses the barren hills of the…
Four years after his previous feature Koza, director Ivan Ostrochovsky returns to the Berlinale (this time under the new competition sidebar known as Encounters)…
Orphea is as scattershot a film as one would expect from the unlikely artistic duo of Alexander Kluge and Khavn De La Cruz. The…
40 years after his film Grand Opera debuted as part of the Berlinale lineup, legendary avant-garde filmmaker James Benning returns with a personal, strangely…
Our first dispatch from the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival takes on a diverse mix of 2019 festival circuit frequenters and a pool of…
A White, White Day is an uneven story of overcoming trauma that fails to muster the requisite pathos for its thematic material. Iceland’s Oscar entry…
An utterly predictable narrative exercise, And Then We Danced salvages some intrigue in the celebration and presentation of its titular art. A familiar tale rears its…
The Whistlers makes the most of its basic parts, tying some nifty knots and glossing up proceedings, but it fails to offer anything memorable. Corneliu…
Vitalina Varela is a profound humanistic effort, conceptually bold and featuring compositions of affecting beauty. Winner of last year’s Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film…
While Saint Frances manages to mine some rich thematic material, its standard lo-fi indie aesthetic fails to elevate. For his feature film debut, director Alex Thompson…
Tseden’s latest is a clever indictment of the ways that both religion and government seek to deny women their due agency. Tibetan director Pema Tseden’s…
Patricio Guzmán’s latest documentary offers similar but waning insight to his two previous, more successful efforts. The Cordillera of Dreams is the third and final…
I Was at Home, But… is an admirable but obnoxious examination of the nature of artifice. At right around the halfway mark of writer-director Angela Schanelec’s…
After Midnight is an exercise in indie intentionality, seeking to upend genre convention but mustering only smug banality. Labels are always reductive and usually insulting.…
Young Ahmed is an misguided effort in the Dardennes’ usually rock solid filmography. Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne have created a corpus of films strong enough…