Poverty and opulence, the pastoral and the high-tech, war and peace, childhood and adulthood. Opposite ends of a variety of spectrums meet, and sometimes clash,…
The life of the tortured artist: society doesn’t understand them, friends and family abandon them, their audience doesn’t appreciate their work. From the artist’s perspective,…
Some day, our future will be someone else’s past. Arco, the titular co-protagonist of illustrator, comic book author, and short film director Ugo Bienvenu’s debut…
“The voices on the phone are real.” So states the caption that appears on screen early in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab,…
Filmmakers as confident and as distinctive as Bi Gan are rarely as young as he. At just 36 years of age, he’s directed four short…
A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar…
To know the value of something, you can’t just win it — you have to earn it. That’s a lesson that Edward Berger, cinema’s new…
Elaborate, ephemeral, and exceedingly difficult to pull off, the souffle takes a serious amount of skill, experience, and precision to make, but typically takes just…
There’s comfort on familiar terrain. The coming-of-age story has been a mainstay in storytelling across all media for as long as stories have been told;…
Since his starring role in 2023’s Oppenheimer, a role that made him a bona fide Hollywood A-lister and won him an Academy Award, Cillian Murphy…
Credit where it’s due: Dane Komljen is one uncompromising director. After his debut feature, 2016’s All the Cities of the North, enjoyed widespread acclaim from…
“An ode to cinema” — an audacious claim with which to open one’s feature, but audacity courses through the work of Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah…
“Arkhitekton” in Greek — “master builder” in English. The world that we humans have created around us is a world of stone; cold, stoic, though…
Sometimes, all it takes is a platform. The rubble of an abandoned village can be a platform for a flag, the flag a symbol of…
Jaime Rosales’ Morlaix opens with a montage: open rural landscapes stretching over hills and fields, cut through by roads and paths. Then, a sleepy town,…
Nothing elicits an emotional response quite like a shock. Things hit harder when you haven’t had time to prepare for them — the funniest jokes,…
The rousing action epic may seem, in the age of bloated superhero flicks and video game adaptations, a thing of cinema’s past. If, for example,…
Movies about the music industry can be a tough pitch. Selling a superstar artist as just that demands either the savviest ear for commercially viable…
There are filmmakers so dominant that you can detect their influence in the works of other filmmakers throughout the years, around the world — Ford,…
There is no creation without destruction, no light without darkness. When the great colonial powers (great as in imposing, not as in good) of centuries…
A white person adrift in an “exotic” land, losing themselves in order to find themselves in the perceived primitiveness, peculiarity, or freedom of their strange…