Ah, but first: an introduction. This is the first entry of Flashback, a new column hosted by In Review Online. Here, I play your very…
Following Pacifiction, his seventh and most technically elaborate narrative film, Albert Serra did something unexpected: he produced his first full-length documentary. Afternoons of Solitude is…
Socrates: The main question I want to ask is whether a lifetime spent scratching, itching and scratching, no end of scratching, is also a life…
It’s girthy, oversized, gold-encrusted, evocative of pain more than pleasure. No, I’m not talking about the massive enameled penis that makes a couple appearances throughout…
“This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Space…
It’s worth beginning where a piece like this usually doesn’t, because Munich is the kind of movie Steven Spielberg usually doesn’t make: in a film…
Karl Marx’ oft-cited quip about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce,” could easily apply to Special Operation, Oleksiy Radynski’s…
It all starts with a bang. Sirât immerses itself into a spectacular DIY rave in the Moroccan desert, before its narrative kicks off proper. Engulfed…
“Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly!” — not a surrealist pamphlet upon obvious improvements to the game…
Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker invested in making sense of our current technology-driven world. His camera frame often has live action footage sharing the screen…
Josef von Sternberg always had a materialistic streak — it was a necessity to produce the kind of effects he was chasing. He never embraced…
The soldiers of Roberto Minervini’s The Damned play cards, wander around, and casually debate theology. The year is 1862, and these Union soldiers find themselves…
Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, currently in U.S. theaters after initially premiering nearly a year ago at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May…
It makes sense that Joel Potrykus has remained a Michigan filmmaker his entire career. His rebellious, don’t-ask-permission attitude is right at home in a state…
The two sequences that form the beginning of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April set a mood of violent unease. We follow a faceless creature, vaguely humanoid despite…
After 2021’s El Planeta, Amalia Ulman ups the ante with her second feature, Magic Farm, in every conceivable way. Black-and-white cinematography here gives way to…
I was not surprised that I was deeply charmed by young Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills To Pay, which screened at this year’s New Directors/New…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of…
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is an impressionistic look at a small beach town in South Florida awaiting a large Hurricane to pass through. Simpson’s…
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong Kong,…