Festival Coverage

Parallel Mothers If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest feature crystallizes this as fact. His first feature since the success of Pain & Glory finds Almodóvar in peak…

The French Dispatch For better or for worse, there are few working American auteurs whose visual stamps are as broadly and immediately recognizable as Wes Anderson. Not even shifting mediums from live-action to stop motion could disguise his trademarks: a meticulous and colorful mise-en-scene…

Red Rocket It’s been far too long since we’ve been graced with a legitimate performance from Simon Rex a.k.a Dirt Nasty, the most esteemed white boy rapper turned comedy superstar. Thriving in the 2000s as both pop musician and the star of the post-Wayans…

The Tragedy of Macbeth The Coens excel in films that flaunt a superficial mastery of genre, form, and cinematic grammar, all to arrive at intentionally depleted and exhausted conclusions. Projects either end up in absolute infernos (Barton Fink), or coil themselves so tightly they…

Relative to other prestigious annual film festivals, NYFF typically operates — like due to its situation within the calendar year — as more of a curative experience than earlier events, collecting together the best of the year’s festival circuit according to its programming team.…

After Blue (Dirty Paradise) Bertrand Mandico’s new lo-fi whatsit After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is wildly ambitious, extremely beautiful, and maddeningly dull. In the film’s unspecified future, humankind has abandoned Earth and colonized a new, distant planet, After Blue. Determined to not repeat the same…

Dear Chantal After something of a breakout with last year’s delightful meta feature Fauna, Nicolás Pereda returns with Dear Chantal, a short created as part of the “Las cartas que no fueron también son” project, an omnibus initiative by the Punto de Vista International…

The Eyes of Tammy Faye The rise of evangelism has had no small impact on the cultural and political dynamics of America today, having — partly a visceral reaction against the proliferation of civil rights movements in the sixties, partly a rallying cry around…

The Rescue Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a knack for humanizing the most extreme situations and conditions on Earth. 2015’s Meru documented Chin’s attempt to climb the eponymous Himalayan peak, while the Oscar-winning Free Solo documented their friend Alex Honnold as he…

Memoria Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival films over the past two decades: hammock cinema, in which films that appear to reject storytelling actually rely on…