Inside a brightly lit Dunkin’ Donuts, Tyler, a construction worker, meets another, Widgey, who is about to hire him for a home renovation job. Tyler…
Bulgarian filmmaker Stefan Kotzev had a more traditional scripted drama in mind for his first feature than what he eventually made. Working in close collaboration…
There is a motif at the center of Hlynur Palmason’s latest feature, The Love That Remains. A static camera, its gaze affixed to the seaside…
The unknowables that inform the maintenance and dissolution of familial relationships are, for Hylnur Pálmason, generative. Fittingly, then, his new film, The Love That Remains,…
There’s little to say about Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows that hasn’t already been said. Like any great film, it’s animated by an internal…
In a moment in history increasingly submerged in a swill of irony and pessimism, James L. Brooks’ insistence on goodness feels like the last burst…
Hurricanes are part of life in South Florida, a season in the calendar as ubiquitous as Summer and Fall; there’s even a rhyme for them,…
Critiquing the directorial efforts of well-known actors is trickier than it seems. For example, it’s impossible to ignore, especially at a festival as prestigious and…
In Neo Sora’s Happyend, Tokyo — indeed, all of Japan — is preparing itself for a 100-year earthquake. The mood of the film’s opening scene,…
Much was made after the premiere of James Sweeney’s second feature, Twinless, of a steamy sex scene between his and Dylan O’Brien’s characters. Fans of…
Bing Liu ascribed a refreshingly unsentimental energy to the coming-of-age genre in his Oscar-nominated documentary, Minding the Gap. For his debut narrative feature, Preparation for…
Creative partners since the early 1940s, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly hadn’t actually made a film together for three years when It’s Always Fair Weather…
Alex Russell’s debut feature, Lurker, is a mask-off exploration of rabid stan culture taken to extremes. When ascendant pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) walks into…
Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of…
If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of…
Sophy Romvari has used cinema to mine the fractured, seemingly incomplete nature of her family history since her first short film, Nine Behind. In that…
You might not assume it, but the handsome, boyish, 19-year-old Leonardo (Manfredi Marini) at the center of Giovanni Tortorici’s refreshingly pulse-tapping debut, Diciannove, doesn’t feel…
Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her approach…
The world of Drifting Laurent, the sophomore feature by directors Anton Balekdjian, Léo Couture, and Mattéo Eustachon, is not too dissimilar from that of Alain…
A father dies, the family prepares the deceased for the next life. The simplicity of the premise of Tenzin Phuntsog’s narrative feature debut, Next Life,…