“Hope is the dream of those who are awake,” muses Nélida (Soledad Pelayo) to her daughter, Elisa (Martina Passeggi), in a display of gentle…
Much has been made about the terror of the deep blue sea and its inhabitants, and the shark movie in particular is a genre…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long…
In the face of ongoing, ever-intensifying genocide, nuance is arguably out of order, and so agit-prop wisdom becomes a creative’s necessary juice. But for…
Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms…
When the world turned to shit approximately five years ago, satire marched ahead, determined to outpace the banality of lived reality. Old-school broadcasts and…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies…
There’s a deadpan finality in the titular utterance of Iair Said’s first fiction feature, a contrived despondency passing off as statistical fact. In Most…
Stray dogs, lone horses, and rampant horniness may not make for pleasing documentary subject matter, but they add to the sense of joie de…
Narrative, as academics and book club members alike will tell you, is as much about process as it is about the final product. A…
Watching the opening credits of Mimi Cave’s Holland, one would not be entirely remiss to recall the barren sound stage of Lars von Trier’s…
Empires, as a rule, do not exist in the plural, for each empire conceives of itself as sovereign and total. In practice, this solipsism…
The title of Erica Xia-Hou’s stirring if conspicuous first feature is not a misprint: “banr,” translated and truncated from the Mandarin term for “partner,”…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon…
The title appears like a misnomer. At a tight 67 minutes, and with such glorious irreverence embedded within its form, Broken Rage doesn’t even…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited…
Genre fare has sunk to new depths with The Dead Thing, Elric Kane’s first solo-directed feature — and an enervating one at that. There’s…
“People are cheap, water is expensive.” So says Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the mysterious and curiously educated drifter who stumbles into Ali’s (Ekin Koç)…