A staid frostiness envelops the frames of Florin Şerban’s smoldering latest feature, whose clinching of the top prize at its Locarno premiere serves as an…
Found family is sometimes thicker than blood, and in Amartei Armar’s uplifting feature debut, his two youthful protagonists first band together against all the world’s…
The appeal of the legend lies less, as one might think, in its relatability to mortal affairs, but precisely in its sublime, eternal otherness where…
The quaint and rustic settlement of Sangerhausen, in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt, might have been an incidental choice of setting, but much of Julian Radlmaier’s quietly revelatory…
For introverts and the unaccomplished, the greatest threat looming over every family gathering isn’t the unlikely prospect of mass violence, but an all too conscious…
Just as Saltburn cemented the shtick of class satire onto its eye-watering Pinterest moodboards, Karim Aïnouz’s curiously engaging take on the hollow sex lives of…
A more oblique interlocutor than Matthew McConaughey’s nihilist operative “Rust” Cohle in True Detective, Sawandi Groskind’s Staubwelt arguably dramatizes the central premise of philosophical pessimism…
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…
The nexus of trite and thesis-like is where Lilian T. Mehrel’s Honeyjoon coalesces; a light, personal rumination on the shared experience of grieving, Mehrel’s easygoing…
Among civilized Europe, the French as a collective may have a unique predilection for social dysfunction, or at least a unique openness to confronting and…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon death,…
America’s contested legacy began even before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and, as far as cinema is concerned, continues to outgrow the fervid…
Chivalry is very much not dead in the modern world: just look at the title of Thea Sharrock’s latest, and be impressed by the double…
A presupposition of Bruno Dumont’s cinema is that the bare world into which we enter is circumscribed by moral order. This should not be confused…
Talk of generations forgotten is typically regarded as historical fact, whereas dreams about the desiccated self are frequently dismissed as melodramatic outings a dime a…
More an indictment of pop referentiality than a true reflection of psyche, the opening minute of Katarina Zhu’s Bunnylovr edges toward a pat diagnosis of…
No civilization without land was the starting point of Carl Schmitt’s definition of the nomos — the measure by which land “in a particular order…
Plenty of films have traversed the anxieties of separation and national identity, specifically the question of what happens when a nation breaks up from within,…
Over a small jetty, a cruise ship waits to dock and its passengers get ready to dismount. The process is unrushed, methodical; a throng of…
Originally popularized and coveted by the Western world, the esteemed traveler cut a formidable figure for its elites: the rationalists for their admiration of breathtaking…
Excepting the newly bicurious and the chronically polyamorous, most people will adore Erupcja for the wrong reasons. Pete Ohs’ sixth narrative feature has, on the…