A purveyor of artifice and decadence, the films of Bertrand Mandico are at their most interesting on the purely visual plane. He fills his frames…
“Four years have passed since the accident. You feel that your relationship to radioactive contamination is changing,” intones the narrator near the beginning of Ana…
A frontier western without any ontologically stable sense of indigeneity or the homestead, Pablo Aparo’s The Victors is a film that resists the easy binaries…
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” – Frederic Jameson No one seems to enjoy the world we…
A Summer Tale A man has fallen: Argentine director Matías Szulanski’s A Summer Tale opens with a classic noir setup, one rendered gorgeously in Sunset…
A man has fallen: Argentine director Matías Szulanski’s A Summer Tale opens with a classic noir setup, one rendered gorgeously in Sunset Boulevard, Le Jour…
Action films might be the closest argument we still have for cinema as a universal language. It’s the most exportable genre, with stars and filmmakers…
Misery isn’t a genre, but it’s a motif and an emotion that many independent and arthouse films seem to think is the defining state of…
Follies If the sex comedy has become a rare breed in the two decades since its American Pie-to-Apatow heyday in the aughts, the marriage comedy, a…
Should war documentaries be fun? At the very least, we don’t expect them to be boring. It often feels like the whole genre is less…
“Life is cheesy sometimes,” says Liz (Valerie Pachner) in voiceover, moments before turning around at the airport and running back to embrace her lover, Ahmed…
If the sex comedy has become a rare breed in the two decades since its American Pie-to-Apatow heyday in the aughts, the marriage comedy, a…
Can an auteur just take the piss every now and then? There’s always something distinctly perverse and ultimately scintillating about major figures going minor. It’s…
“Is what you’re doing worth a child’s tears?” a stranger asked Georgian filmmaker Nutsa Gogoberidze as she was heading off to make her film Uzhmuri…
There are few rings of cinematic hell worse than bad broad comedies. Watching Rasmus Merivoo’s Alien 2 or: The Return of Valdis in 17 Episodes…
Arriving at the Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia this year, I found myself witness to a brewing controversy. Deaf Lovers, a new film…
“We don’t want to scare people,” a director says at the beginning of Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man. It’s the set of a workplace educational…
As Lav Diaz’s films have shrunk in reception, they have only grown in eclecticism and importance. A decade on from Norte: The End of History…
Slackers have been the bread and butter of indie cinema since 90’s mainstays like Clerks and Slacker helped jumpstart the whole modern American independent film…
“Toys are too preoccupied with fun,” Alejandro (Julio Torres) declares in a cover letter to Hasbro during the opening of Torres’ debut feature film Problemista.…
It’s become a cliche to point out the cliche of the arthouse festival darling that amounts to essentially two hours of a marginalized person getting…