The middle class context of Kostis Charamountanis’ Kyuka: Before Summer’s End gives its story of a languid, European summer vacation a refreshingly dressed-down feel. Like…
Filmmaker Pete Ohs’ working methods prioritize flexibility, openness, and spontaneity. As with all of his features so far, his latest, The True Beauty of Being…
The opening shot ofTrương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam depicts two men in enveloping darkness. One carries the other on his back as he trudges…
When Armand Yervant Tufenkian worked as a fire lookout in the forests of Central California, his protracted, expectant gazing into the distance made him wonder…
In Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature, Evidence, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, the conspiracy theory adopts a progressive slant. With Schmitt’s characteristic…
Thoughtful film curation asks us to consider films in a new light. Alexander Horwath knows this better than most, having served as director of the…
A simple sprinkling of chemicals into an in-ground pool reveals more about the enigmatic figure at the center of Ted Kennedy’s B.F. Skinner Plays Himself…
It’s a sign of great writing when you can identify everything you love and hate about a character, but can’t decide whether you love or…
Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with…
In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to…
When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for a new anamorphic lens technology in 1952, whose origins dated back to a 1926 process called Anamorphoscope,…
It’s hard to say how much genuine excitement there is for new Lord of the Rings properties. As the lukewarm reception to Amazon’s billion-dollar, multi-series…
It’s a bit of a shame that Kaveh Daneshmand’s new film Endless Summer Syndrome comes to us in the wake of Catharine Breillat’s Last Summer.…
There’s a moment near the end of the first act of The Black Sea when Khalid (Derrick B. Harden), a Brooklynite stranded in the port…
It’s a bold strategy, especially today, to go courting favor for a reactionary, conspiracy-minded, sexually repressed young man. Set aside the recent Presidential election results,…
Across three features Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most vital contemporary voices in American cinema. After the positive reception to his…
By the time Miklós Jancsó made Red Psalm in 1972, he had already established his own allegorical mode of filmmaking. Stories of uprisings, movements, massacres,…
Sofia Bohdanowicz has always been a filmmaker unafraid to mine the uncomfortable depths of her own, and her family’s, history. Across 10 years of shorts…
By now there’s little ground left to break within the Mockumentary genre, a fact only reinforced by Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight, a handsomely mounted biopic…
As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts them,…
Since his debut feature, Tower, 12 years ago, Kazik Radwanski’s tendency to foreground his characters’ inner turmoil has been matched, and perhaps maintained, by his…