Festival Coverage

Between Dog and Wolf In Irene Gutiérrez’s Between Dog and Wolf, the relationship between past and present — and future — is vertiginous. We are left to deduce the time and place on the basis of some scattered memorabilia, and the age of the…

The Spine of Night The Spine of Night is a whole lot of movie. Despite the film’s relatively straightforward fantasy logline — sorcerer goes mad with power, attempts to take over and/or destroy the world, unassuming hero saves the day — both its narrative…

Fucking with Nobody For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is a filmmaker who, after losing a project to her nemesis Kristian, gets involved in a fake Instagram catfishing scheme with…

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched In 2012, writer and film programmer Kier-La Janisse published House of Psychotic Women, a tremendous and essential text, part autobiography, part confessional, part film-guide roadmap to decades of cinematic depictions of female trauma, desire, and death. It’s one of…

Gaia There’s an ancient, malevolent force living in the depths of the forest in director Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia, a psychedelic bit of eco-horror that finds nature taking over and transforming the human body in hideous ways. Forest Rangers Gabi (Monique Rockman) and Winston (Anthony Oseyemi)…

After being forced to cancel 2020’s festival in the eleventh hour in the wake of Covid’s proliferation across the U.S., SXSW returns in 2021. Adopting the virtual format — even after Gov. Greg Abbott’s most recent act of idiocy (which, honestly, probably isn’t the…

Lovers A deceptively boilerplate film noir with shades of drab eroticism, Nicole Garcia’s Lovers belies an astonishing sublimation of its cultural and existential milieux. Premiering amidst an especially weak lineup at Venice, and receiving an almost-unanimously negative response, her much-maligned latest originally bore the…

Love Affair(s) Like several films in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema lineup, Love Affair(s) is a title that was meant to premiere at Cannes 2020, under “The Newcomers” banner (meant to highlight directors of note making their Cannes debuts). Also like other Rendez-Vous offerings,…

Petite Maman Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed on a precipice of some essential awareness, riding the ebbs and flows of emerging self-knowledge, and arriving at necessarily unsettled places. Specifically, her films explore that bardo between childhood and adulthood — often, but not always…

Bloodsuckers In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori — whose existence in Byron’s mansion resembled something more like an in-house drug dealer than a typical country doctor…