An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
Few worlds in cinema are as unmistakable as those of Chilean visual-art virtuosos Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, whose astonishing craft is matched by the…
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…
Major credit is due to KVIFF for continuing to world-premiere some of the roughest documentaries from the Ukrainian frontline. Two years ago, the festival unveiled…
Cannes seems to have settled into a kind of violent habit: slotting a promising film by a female auteur into its tail end. This year’s…
Out of the diamond-blue depths of the night sky over southern France, Jean Moulin parachutes down. By the time the film opens in 1943, the…
At the 75th edition of Cannes, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022) sparked considerable attention, premiering in Un Certain Regard. This playfully reimagined portrait of…
Pawel Pawlikowski, the immaculate king of grim black-and-white Eastern European cinema, has made us wait eight years for a new film. After the exquisite moral…
Character-driven documentaries place their subjects in a vulnerable position, allowing filmmakers to construct the version of life that will remain attached to them forever. In his…
When Blerta Basholli premiered her debut feature Hive in 2021, it played like a small miracle. The Kosovar Albanian director broke records at Sundance, taking…
Jacqueline Zünd’s documentary Heat takes place across the Persian Gulf, one of the hottest spots on planet Earth today. Though not because of the ongoing…
The redundant fatigue from the influx of Russo-Ukrainian war documentaries remedies itself if one begins to recognize their level of artistic excellence. One such effective…
The opening shot of Dutch director Jona Honer’s documentary Club Heaven plunges us into the heart of the “Playhouse” club in Chengdu. A perfectly symmetrical…