Festival Coverage

Lovers Rock Steve McQueen has always been a fine purveyor of potentially rich and powerful narratives, but he’s been much less consistent as their steward. His first three features all focused on singular individuals locked in combat with dominant cultural norms or mores, and…

The fall festival season has looked far different this year, limited both in its ability to exhibit films and in the breadth of selection available. As a result, heading into the 58th New York Film Festival, InRO has already published pieces on roughly one-third…

Falling The prospect of spending a couple hours with one of the most tremendously unpleasant movie characters you’re likely to ever encounter might not even be the first reason to check out of Viggo Mortensen’s Falling, but it’s certainly the most apparent. This clearly…

The Best Is Yet to Come Think Spotlight but shot by Yu Lik-wai, Jia Zhang-ke’s favorite DP. Sounds pretty neat, right? And for a while, The Best Is Yet to Come is an involving, topical newsroom drama: Wang Jing zips through the early, procedural-minded portion…

The Disciple Sharad Nerulkar — the titular disciple in Chaitanya Tamhane’s sophomore feature — is, by most accounts, unexceptional. He’s devoted his life to archiving, preserving, and, most importantly to him, practicing and performing classical Indian vocal music that’s considered outdated and inert by…

Pieces of a Woman Director Kornél Mundruczó knows how to open a film (see the otherwise underwhelming White God, for example), and with Pieces of a Woman he sets out to obliterate his previous benchmark. After quick, separate introductions to Shawn (Shia LaBeouf) and…

Soul Emir Ezwan’s debut feature, Soul, is part of an emerging Malaysian cinema heavily composed of genre fare. Made for roughly $80,000 USD, the horror film is clearly a labor of love and, on the strength of its slick jungle compositions and dark, dynamic…

Night of the Kings Storytelling is at the crux of Philippe Lacôte’s entrancing sophomore feature, whose structural integrity depends upon a viewer’s willingness to accept its dramatic reflexivity. A mythopoetic work invoking the oral tradition of One Thousand and One Nights, and utilising a…

Lahi, Hayop Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s filmography is virtually an exemplar of the temporal nexus of historical and contemporaneous representations of authoritarian exploitation. Lahi, Hayop holds that line, focusing on a string of snowballing murders and intimidations. But the film also appears…

Nomadland Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip assessment of a film that takes to the fringes of American life: Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction work of the…