It’s difficult to know what to do with the films of Mickey Keating; finding success in low-budget indie filmmaking should always be applauded, but frequently…
Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark — director and famed producer of numerous classics, including but not limited to Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind, Zu:…
Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has made, really, one kind of film for the majority of his career: decadent exercises in excess that observe the absurdity of…
Veteran action director Martin Campbell seems to be more prolific than ever these days, having just released his women-on-a-mission war film Dirty Angels a scant…
It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the person reading this review right now has never heard of Edward Burns, let alone seen any of his…
With his 2019 debut Saint Frances, Alex Thompson offered up a strong resume. It wasn’t a film that entirely worked, but it was rich in…
Universal Language opens on a static wide shot outside a French language school in snowy Winnipeg. We see the teacher grumpily trudge in late. Once…
Compared to its predecessor, 2017’s widely acclaimed Paddington 2, Paddington in Peru will feel to most a bit more like standard kiddie fare. Paddington 2…
“24 of your favorite stars in Nashville!” hollers the voiceover in the opening credits of Robert Altman’s consensus favorite and magnum opus. (We can ignore…
Universal Language is, at its core, a community portrait. Matthew Rankin’s second feature was co-written and imagined by friends and collaborators Pirouz Namati and Ila…
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) would be Otto Preminger’s last film for 20th Century Fox, capping off a productive (if tumultuous) chapter in the director’s…
Why do we even watch this movie in the first place? This is one of those scary movies, isn’t it? For years we hear about…
The year before he starred in Witness — Peter Weir’s acclaimed drama about a cop sent to protect a young Amish boy who witnesses a…
Pavements “The world’s most important and influential band breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” Thus begins Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, establishing from the…
In Sandro Aguilar’s 2015 short film, Undisclosed Recipients, two lovers meet at the Paredes de Coura Festival in Portugal. The night is a liquid black,…
Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe has been making exquisite short films for the past several years, works that hold out the suggestion of narrative meaning but…
It may be somewhat surprising to learn that The Last Dance has become the highest-grossing (domestic) film in Hong Kong history, if only because we’re…
Writer-director Aaron Rookus’ film De Idylle (Dutch for Idyllic) presents an interconnected menagerie of death-haunted people — like all of us, they fear death, crave…
While production houses continue to mine disparate art forms for content, the question of how to transpose the art of one medium onto another often…
Boasting roughly a dozen features and a handful of short films, French cineaste Emmanuel Mouret has proven himself a peculiar taste and charm for specific…
Blazing Fists I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the…