As its title suggests, transformation is the subject of Ashley McKenzie’s feature debut, Werewolf—a film that is at once empathetic and unsentimental. McKenzie follows Blaise…
With Princess Cyd, Chicago-based director Stephen Cone extends his interest in exploring the push-pull of the mind, body and spirit, with a generous emphasis on…
“YOU NEED TISSUES FOR YOUR ISSUES” reads a woman’s shirt near the start of Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind, the director’s second film from…
For anyone lamenting the political reticence of much of American independent filmmaking, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project—the consensus favorite of this year’s Directors’ Fortnight…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
Though Terence Davies was absent from the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2015, his Emily Dickinson film A Quiet Passion makes its appearance this…
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…