Raoul Peck’s latest documentary certainly has timeliness going for it. There is of course a rise of authoritarianism around the world, a set of schemes…
Coming to NYFF by way of the Giornate degli Artori in Venice, Gabriel Azorín’s debut feature is a bold swing for the fences, the sort…
In the last 10 or 15 years, the micro-universe that we call the experimental film world has made a decisive shift toward a form of…
The Cannes Film Festival has a reputation (not entirely undeserved) for skewing its selections toward the more abstruse, audience-unfriendly end of the international cinema spectrum.…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome…
Girl, the directorial debut of Taiwanese actress Shu Qi, is a beautiful film about a number of ugly subjects. In many respects, this is the…
In 2002, Hungarian director Pálfi György released his first film Hukkle to near-universal acclaim. The title, which is an onomatopoeia for the sound of a…
The third and final Wavelengths group program, Slightest Pretense, is a decidedly mixed bag, although it does contain the two best films in the entire…
Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s last film, 2023’s Green Border, was a fact-based drama about migrants who were lured to Belarus by false promises of asylum,…
When one sees enough festival films, certain patterns begin to emerge. This isn’t in reference to the thematic ones that are often articulated in critics’…
The debut feature from Spanish director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias is a different kind of coming-of-age story, one that finds its young protagonist Cata (Zoe Stein)…
In the opening scenes of Cai Shangjun’s The Sun Rises on Us All, a woman in her mid-30s, Meiyun (Xin Zhilei), is getting an ultrasound.…
Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke is a delight, a playful formalist in a sea of self-serious festival auteurs. But because comedy is often viewed askance by…
One could argue that it speaks to the humanistic timelessness of The Bicycle Thieves that it just keeps getting remade, with the circumstances adapted to…
The first of this year’s Wavelengths short film programs begins, appropriately enough, with Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, a 2016 work by Tomonari…
Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has…
Russian luminary Alexander Sokurov delivers another curveball. Following Fairytale, his 2022 animated feature about notorious leaders of the 20th century languishing in purgatory, Sokurov offers…
Unlike the big three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), Locarno does not traditionally feel an obligation to elevate domestic product into its competition.…
It’s always fortuitous for a documentary filmmaker to find themselves able to capture seismic historical shifts as they are happening. But of course, this is…
In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The…