Unlike the big three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), Locarno does not traditionally feel an obligation to elevate domestic product into its competition.…
Tamara Stepanyan’s film In the Land of Arto begins with a service interruption that functions as a metaphor. Céline (Camille Cottin) is traveling by train…
Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the…
Delicately unfurling as an introductory vocabulary lesson, one informed by the portraiture at the film’s core — that of the formidable Thi Hau Cao, a…
2021’s Nobody, which starred Bob Odenkirk as a suburban family man who is actually, basically, John Wick, was a breakout hit during the Covid days.…
In the late 1950s, Brazilian footballer Didi introduced a new technique for kicking the ball, the so called “dry leaf.” Much like a leaf falling…
Nisha Ganatra’s film Freakier Friday is the perfect case study in Disney’s endlessly stretchable IP. The idea for it all started with Mary Roger’s 1972…
“Welcome to the new West,” in which teenage rodeo riders with undercuts listen to cloud rap and horses are sold on TikTok. In East of…
It’s always fortuitous for a documentary filmmaker to find themselves able to capture seismic historical shifts as they are happening. But of course, this is…
Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been…
While at 5’5” both he and Woody Allen are the same height, Roman Polanski stands tallest on the Mount Rushmore of reviled living filmmakers. As…
Dry Leaf Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a…
Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of…
The decadent luxury and moral rot of extreme wealth; a location as isolated as it is idyllic; lithe young bodies glistening in sunlight; the churning…
In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The…
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…
Genndy Tartakovsky has earned the one for him. As creator of some of the most seminal animated television of the late ‘90s and early 2000s,…
Peter Fonda’s self-produced Idaho Transfer (1972) exists online as a decrepit VHS rip and a few equally shoddy digital re-uploads. I’ve heard tell of an…
In the intro to My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow, director Julia Loktev states that none of the subjects or herself…