It can often be difficult to evaluate the work of a director who is branching out from their niche. With Jon Bois, he has worked…
Alice Rohrwacher’s cinema occupies a unique place in the festival landscape, part pleasingly familiar and part bracingly daring, especially in the context of her relatively…
As the star of Hong Sang-soo has improbably grown, the traditional (and often erroneous) stereotypes lobbed against his films have stayed stuck in the mud.…
When Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days was announced to play in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, his first since 2008’s totally forgotten Palermo Shooting,…
From his early short films to his two breakout features, Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Staying Vertical (2016), Alain Guiraudie has long conveyed a…
The way in which people interact with the archaic or outmoded is an ever-evolving proposition. Especially given the unbelievable pace of the 20th and 21st…
Will-o’-the-Wisp, João Pedro Rodrigues’s long-awaited follow-up feature to The Ornithologist, almost seems to take the form of a sketch. Running a slender 67 minutes and…
Ashley McKenzie’s debut feature, Werewolf, already suggested a talent to watch in its refracted take on the addiction/relationship drama. While its dramatic sense felt stuck…
It’s perhaps unfair to say that divorce dramas have had too great a resurgence in recent years. The genre is by its nature a prime,…
Call Jane can come across as tidy and overly satisfied, but Nagy’s facility with actors and visuals keeps things proceeding with assurance. Call Jane, the directorial…
God’s Creatures works best in its embrace of character interiority, but a tendency toward stacking the deck with symbol and portent leaves little nuance to reckon…
Casablanca Beats boasts some technical rap prowess, but its narrative fails to develop any depth and the film suffers from a banal and maudlin ending. Casablanca…
Riotsville, USA traces an alternate history on top of official record and crafts an incisive examination that is as hypnotic as it is fervent. It’s almost…
In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to, if…
Cinephilia is necessarily littered with the detritus of half-remembered viewing experiences, films only glimpsed from childhood in a perspective almost wholly incompatible with the viewer’s…
Free Chol Soo Lee doesn’t quite feel like a full exploration of its subject matter, but Ha and Yi’s act of excavation still ultimately proves moving.…
Patrick: So we’ve made it to the finale, Ryan. In our last correspondence I wrote of Assayas’ proclivity for compartmentalization, boxing different characters away once…
El Gran Movimiento offers a thoroughly idiosyncratic and elliptical approach to the city symphony, one rooted in character and in which the spirit of the…
It’s perhaps become a moot point to invoke the shadow of Apichatpong Weerasethakul when talking about an emerging festival filmmaker’s work in the 21st century.…
Ryan: I originally intended to open this second part of our correspondence with a scene I thought was in this stretch from episodes five to…
A Love Song has a rustic, unadorned quality that is easy to appreciate, but its calculated modesty only does so much to distinguish it from…