Gina (Lindsay Burdge), a flight attendant, hooks up with Jérôme (Damien Bonnard), a mustachioed bartender at a Parisian strip-club, after her husband commits suicide (a…
Theo Anthony’s Rat Film, which first premiered at Locarno in August, wastes no time in grabbing your attention, opening with voiceover about the beginning of…
Sometimes all it takes to set a film apart is a distinctive milieu. In Deepak Rauniyar’s White Sun, the setting is a remote village in Nepal…
Eliza Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love, was a promising, if familiar Brooklyn-set tale of a teenage girl’s burgeoning sexuality. With, Beach Rats, Hittman…
It’s hard to imagine French director Alain Guiraudie going for mainstream appeal, but if he did, the result might look something like Jérôme Reybaud’s road…
While it’s exciting to discover completely unknown directors, it’s equally—if not more—interesting to watch a (relatively) well-known artist transition into feature filmmaking. Making his debut…
Many ND/NF entries have demonstrated an admirable scale in their ambitions, but few have had the confidence to do so as unassumingly as Dustin Guy Defa’s pleasantly low-key Person…
Marking French writer-director Jean-Gabriel Periot’s first step into fiction filmmaking (after a string of documentaries), Summer Lights opens, fittingly, with a simple, sustained talking-head interview.…
Although widely dismissed during its initial premiere, Daguerrotype, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first French-language production, finds the Japanese genre master in peak form; the first hour alone…
“Obvious” is likely the last word that would be used to describe Argentine writer-director Gastón Solnicki’s Kékszakállú—by a large margin, the most baffling film discussed…
For anyone who missed The Mole Song: Undercover Agent—Takashi Miike’s first adaptation of Noboru Takahashi’s manga series, Mogura no Uta—the opening minutes of its sequel don’t…
To kick off the 2016 Vancouver International Film Festival, there are perhaps few more fitting titles than Alison Maclean’s long-awaited follow-up to her 1999 film…
Though Terence Davies was absent from the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2015, his Emily Dickinson film A Quiet Passion makes its appearance this year…
Ala Eddine Slim’s The Last of Us is the type of film that’s inevitably described as “spare,” “rigorous,” and “conceptually bold.” Unfolding over a distended 94…
That advice may well be applied to Olivier Assayas’s slippery, sensual Personal Shopper, which does for horror what Irma Vep (still the high watermark of…
Eduardo Williams’s debut feature, The Human Surge, may well benefit from a second look, but it doesn’t incentivize one. That’s certainly not for lack of ambition: Structured…
In the case of Alain Guiraudie’s relentlessly weird Staying Vertical, there may not be anything to do except surrender to the strangeness. The story follows…
Whether one enjoys Son of Joseph will depend on how well one takes to Eugene Green’s very particular style. Favoring declamatory acting, controlled framing and…
On paper, the premise of Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann — a prankster father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), drops in unannounced on his daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), a…
Ted Fendt’s first feature, the refreshingly droll Short Stay, centers on Mike (Mike MacCherone), a passive, socially awkward twenty-something living in New Jersey. When Mark…