An utterly predictable narrative exercise, And Then We Danced salvages some intrigue in the celebration and presentation of its titular art. A familiar tale rears its head…
The Whistlers makes the most of its basic parts, tying some nifty knots and glossing up proceedings, but it fails to offer anything memorable. Corneliu Porumboiu’s The…
Vitalina Varela is a profound humanistic effort, conceptually bold and featuring compositions of affecting beauty. Winner of last year’s Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival,…
While Saint Frances manages to mine some rich thematic material, its standard lo-fi indie aesthetic fails to elevate. For his feature film debut, director Alex Thompson teams…
Tseden’s latest is a clever indictment of the ways that both religion and government seek to deny women their due agency. Tibetan director Pema Tseden’s artistic…
Patricio Guzmán’s latest documentary offers similar but waning insight to his two previous, more successful efforts. The Cordillera of Dreams is the third and final film…
I Was at Home, But… is an admirable but obnoxious examination of the nature of artifice. At right around the halfway mark of writer-director Angela Schanelec’s latest…
Young Ahmed is an misguided effort in the Dardennes’ usually rock solid filmography. Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne have created a corpus of films strong enough to…
After Midnight is an exercise in indie intentionality, seeking to upend genre convention but mustering only smug banality. Labels are always reductive and usually insulting. They…
Another portrait of trauma, Nora Fingesheidt’s debut feature revolves around the social condition indicated by its title: Systemsprenger, or System Crasher. The film follows problem…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some…
Kent Jones once wrote that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s 1999 film Rosetta had “a fearsome unity, an unshakable commitment to rendering the contours of a…
Neighboring Scenes ends its short Film at Lincoln Center engagement today, and we are happy to be covering it for the first time in this,…
The majority of American moviegoers probably have no idea that the new comedy Downhill is a remake of 2014’s French/Swedish co-production Force Majeure, directed by…
Brian Eno will always be best known for his invention of ambient music (or at least its coinage) and for his work as the producer…
Shot between August 2016 and January 2017 in the Dom Pedro Hotel in the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazilian filmmaker Maíra Bühler’s Let it Burn is…
When we open our eyes, what is it that we first see? There’s inanimate objects that we can recognize, but that requires several steps beyond…
The Neighboring Sounds festival booklet describes Private Fiction as Argentinean filmmaker Andres Di Tella charting a turbulent 20th Century romance through archival photos and letters from his parents,…
David Zonana’s Workforce possesses lofty artistic ambitions for a debut: it apes Bresson rather liberally, utilizing somber diegetic music cues, mostly non-professional actors, a relatively…
Marcelo Gomes’ Waiting for the Carnival unfolds in the village of Toritama, the self-proclaimed “capital of jeans,” in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Though it…
Miguel Hilari’s Compania is a small, modest gem of a film, a poetic evocation of mystical and religious ceremonies juxtaposed with the natural beauty of the agrarian…