There is a playful disconnect between the title of Mokya Shin’s EASTER and its subject matter. Although South Korea’s most prominent religion (after atheism or…
Like his 2010 film Cologne Overnight, Declan Clarke’s latest, Love and the End of Romance in Czechoslovakia, takes an instructive approach. Title cards loaded with…
The portable camera is more accessible now than perhaps ever before, and as a result, the diary film seems to have found its footing within…
It’s been five years since RS Benedict’s essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny” was published by Blood Knife. While Benedict focused on…
Sympathetic portrayals of kids who’ve fallen into a life of crime have been commonplace in the arthouse circuit since at least the days of Italian…
Among the standout films that played at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was The Dreamed Adventure, which earned Valeska Grisebach the Jury Prize and marked…
Writer-director Georgia Bernstein’s feature debut, Night Nurse, appears to fit within a poetic label once afforded to Claire Denis: this erotic thriller bears a sense…
If who you are is a sin, what are the consequences of simply living your life? Traditional spiritualism clashes with modern individualism in Nader Saeivar’s…
William Kaufman makes movies like someone who saw the centerpiece bank shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat and internalized every beat of it, determined to bring new heights…
For a viewer who is familiar with Angela Schanelec’s cinema, in particular the three films she has made over the last 10 years, My Wife…
Plenty can go wrong on a school bus trip. In Serbia-born director Miroslav Terzić’s third feature, 3 Weeks After, what begins as a teenage hangout…
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…
Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has…
Incldued in this dispatch: Pure Reason…
Where experimental film is concerned, that subsection we call “structural film” is characterized by a radical transparency. This may seem like an odd claim to…
More than a decade after his first feature, For the Plasma (2014), Bingham Bryant revisits his fascination with images, interpretation, and, crucially, the ways images…
A camera navigates the Mediterranean’s vast cerulean depths. Its gaze is foreign and robotic — an intruder within a dark maritime realm intensely averse to…
Given that present-day existence has been thrown into disarray by — in roughly chronological order — the smartphone, COVID-19, and the resurgence of fascism, how…
“I have to find a way.” This opening voiceover, soothing yet fraught with anxiety, doesn’t initially sound ironic. It sounds sincere, and fitting, as the…
Shireen Seno’s short film you dreamt you saw yourself but couldn’t see your face begins with a small video image situated in the center of…
Like few other working filmmakers, Ted Fendt has created for himself a functioning cinematic universe, full of characters seeking creative and intellectual stimulation and answers…