Festival Coverage

Wong Ping’s Fables 2 The first of two fables in Wong Ping’s Fables 2 is entitled “Cow the Super-Rich.” It’s an amusing anti-capitalist tale about a cow who was, early in his life, a “radical social activist.” He believed violence was necessary for meaningful…

Nasir What’s immediately striking about Nasir, Arun Karthick’s sophomore feature, is the ebb-and-flow rhythm of its slice-of-life portraiture. Karthick immediately and consistently trains his camera on the toil of hands, maestros of daily drudgery; characters’ heads, meanwhile, often extend beyond the frame, as if…

Identifying Features Within a cinematic tradition that associates the violence of Mexico’s crime-infested northern border with the high-stakes machismo of drug cartels and CIA spies, Identifying Features sets itself apart by virtue of its provenance and scope. The feature debut of Fernanda Valadez, a…

The New Directors/New Films festival has emerged in recent years as a major player on the festival scene, programming such diverse heavy-hitters as Black Mother, An Elephant Sitting Still, Milla, and End of the Century over the past two years. And so it was disheartening, an eternity ago…

We at InRO aren’t immune for fall festival fatigue, and that means we too frequently pass over small festivals that deserve the attention. This year we’re making an effort to mitigate that reality, and while we won’t be covering the San Diego Asian Film…

Ammonite Three years on from Francis Lee’s terrific gay drama, God’s Own Country, and the director has moved on from the romantic union of two lusty male farmers to a 19th-century entanglement between a female paleontologist and an unhappy wife. Away from the rural…

Herself A patron of the British arts, Phyllida Lloyd’s transition from a director of theater to film could hardly have been more conspicuous. Her debut feature, Mamma Mia, set box-office records, while her follow-up, The Iron Lady (2011), went on to win two Oscars…

Black Bear In the debate between mimesis and anti-mimesis, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear proffers a third possibility — that life is art in organic action. It’s perhaps inaccurate, and is certainly reductive, to suggest that these are three answers to the same question,…

On the Rocks “It must be very nice to be you.” That’s what Laura (Rashida Jones) says to her gadfly dad Felix (Bill Murray) late in Sofia Coppola’s latest tonic. He’s just sweet-talked his way out of a parking ticket for what’s probably the…

Point and Line to Plane How does one give shape to one’s experience, one’s grief? The question persists through the films of Canadian director Sofia Bohdanowicz, though it takes most literal form in her latest short, Point and Line to Plane, titled after the…