by InRO Staff

The Eyes of Tammy Faye The rise of evangelism has had no small impact on the cultural and political dynamics of America today, having — partly a visceral reaction against the proliferation of civil rights movements in the sixties, partly a rallying cry around…

The Rescue Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a knack for humanizing the most extreme situations and conditions on Earth. 2015’s Meru documented Chin’s attempt to climb the eponymous Himalayan peak, while the Oscar-winning Free Solo documented their friend Alex Honnold as he…

Memoria Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival films over the past two decades: hammock cinema, in which films that appear to reject storytelling actually rely on…

The Guilty Antoine Fuqua has made a career out of directing populist, middlebrow fare that seeks nothing more than to entertain audiences for a few hours with slick, soulless thrills. It’s not that Fuqua is necessarily a bad filmmaker, but he’s the epitome of…

Titane What is the role of “transgressive” art in an ostensibly liberal society? Or, to put it another way: In a cultural context where the top prize of the world’s most prestigious film festival can go to a movie where a woman fucks a…

Reflection While Ukrainian writer/director Valentin Vasyanovych has been making films for a number of years, his breakthrough didn’t come until 2019’s Atlantis, which garnered awards at several festivals and became his first film to receive some kind of wider distribution. Atlantis detailed a hypothetical,…

Another year, another TIFF. Due in part to its situation in the calendar year relative to other major international fests, and in part to its programming strategy, TIFF often works as more of an aggregator festival for major arthouse, auteur, and awards titles, assembling…

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is famous for its portrayal of an inscrutable facial expression, that indelible half-smirk-half-smile that serves as a kind of Rorschach test for the viewing public. It’s appropriate, then, that the name is bestowed…

Striding Into the Wind One of the central tensions in cinema is that of authenticity: The inherent power of this medium comes from its depiction of images and experiences drastically foreign to the viewer, even foreign to our reality. But there’s also an impulse…

Hiruko the Goblin Shinya Tsukamoto: unapologetic termite artist, jack of all cinematic trades — besides merely directing all of his feature-length freak shows, he also writes, produces, shoots, edits, designs, and often acts in them — and an international cult iconoclast of sorts. He…