Horizon Line

You Will Die at Twenty contains plenty of allegorical power, but its ineffectual plotting ultimately teases out more stimulating questions than it does answers. As a motif in his film, Amjad Abu Alala enacts a small gesture, one intimately coupled to the narrative’s concerns: Muzamil,…

Nine Days angles toward profundity, but is a largely maudlin, intellectually bankrupt genre-exercise of self-congratulation. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners sit facing a wall on which the shadows of puppets are projected; with no conception of a world beyond their own, the prisoners…

Film About a Father Who is an intimate, innovative auto-doc about wounded people finding solace in the company of fellow stragglers. Film About A Father Who is Lynne Sachs’ latest, and evidently most personal, feat of documentation. Patched together from various conversations and intimate moments…

Preparations is a major discovery, its distinct character recalling nothing less than the works of Abbas Kiarostami, Christian Petzold, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time opens with a grand romantic gesture. After 20 years in the United States,…

Fernanda Valadez’s debut, while sometimes frustratingly broad, tells a well-known tale through unusual eyes, giving the classic immigration tale a welcome twist. 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…

Our Friend upends some familiar conventions of the terminal illness narrative, but also boasts plenty of missed opportunities. One of the things that can only be learned firsthand when it comes to the death of loved ones is just how much waiting is involved. Waiting…

Notturno is at times oddly diffuse, but the harrowing brutality it captures bears undeniable power. The echoes of war reverberate throughout Notturno, a film of unnerving quietude that, as per its title, unfolds in something like a perpetual gloaming. Directed by Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi,…

Atlantis is an unsettling, poignant study of the casual violence that both informs the past and estimates the future. With Atlantis, director Valentyn Vasyanovych (also editor and cinematographer here) has created a dystopian nightmare out of Ukraine’s current political and social quagmire with Russia. Like…

The Salt of Tears is a pensive film that finds the aged director again reckoning with notions of parenthood, permanence, and familial legacy. Over the course of his half-century career behind the camera, 72-year-old French master Philippe Garrel has traversed a multitude of styles. From…

Downfalls High barely qualifies as a film and attempts little but manages to ride MGK’s guiding charisma to some playful places.  If you were one of the untold number who tuned in to the Facebook Live premiere (or subsequent recording) of Machine Gun Kelly’s debut…