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…
Filmmakers working under the constraints of an oppressive regime must become very good at leaving things unsaid. The main ideas are often relegated to the…
Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed…
One would be hard-pressed to identify a film director on the world stage who has done a better job of articulating our historical moment than…
Julian of Norwich was a religious mystic and anchoress in the Middle Ages. After a grave illness during which she experienced visions of Christ on…
It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for…