Schematically, one could divide Hong Sang-soo’s oeuvre into two sets of films: on the one hand, those where the structural play with narrative is upfront…
Like his previous feature, which opens with a 1988 Coca-Cola ad, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon begins with another vintage commercial — or, at least, a…
Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker…
Against the notion of cinematic auteurism, it has sometimes been thought enough to respond that, after all, cinema is a collaborative medium to which certain…
In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the artform.…
Like his 2012 masterpiece Tabu, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour uses the transition from the silent to the sound era to explore the passage into a…
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia begins, as so many stories do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, 30-something Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is driving to his rural hometown…
In the opening scene of Who by Fire, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s latest feature, a car pulls over along a highway for a brief rest…
The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended experiments…
It has now been seven years since Heinz Emigholz, until 2017 mainly known for his semi-silent architecture films, reintroduced language into his cinema with Streetscapes…
Death Will Come, German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s latest feature (and first French-language production), follows a contract killer, Tez (Sophie Veerbeck), who is hired by an…
When first introduced at the beginning of Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Around, a couple, Ale (Itsaso Ariana) and Alex (Vito Sanz), have already decided…
Evil Does Not Exist is the sort of film one makes after winning an Oscar. Following the massive success of Drive My Car, which has…
When first introduced in About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest feature, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher, has been in the remote village of…
Space and time are rendered deliberately unstable in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. The film is anchored in a new, near-empty London high-rise where…
The issue at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is one of the oldest in the cinema: how does one represent the…
With his latest film Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda has outdone himself. Rather than make one bad film, as he usually does, the Japanese director has made…
In one of the many gnomic remarks of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: “When ‘I raise my arm’, my arm rises. And now a problem…
Few directors have explored the implications of real-time continuity — or a reasonable approximation thereof — as resolutely as Romanian director Cristi Puiu. From his…
The logline of The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa’s follow-up to Person to Person (2016), does not appreciably differ from that of a prototypical Sundance movie.…
The career of Romanian director Paul Negoescu has not been easy to pin down. His debut feature, A Month in Thailand (2012), was a remarkable,…