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…
Eddington When the world turned to shit approximately five years ago, satire marched ahead, determined to outpace the banality of lived reality. Old-school broadcasts and…
Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under…
There are two kinds of cinephile: those who hear a movie described as “Black Swan on ice” and sneer, noses upturned, their one-line, one-and-a-half star…
In the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, a Kyiv-based auditorium turns into an ad hoc military classroom. Civilians take turns…
Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done begins with a cryptic series of images; pitch-black night, a pile of discarded clothing, closeups of various faces, impassive…
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…
Sound of Falling Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…
A white person adrift in an “exotic” land, losing themselves in order to find themselves in the perceived primitiveness, peculiarity, or freedom of their strange…
The titular girl of The Girl in the Snow, director Louise Hémon’s debut feature, appears repeatedly as a dark silhouette. Clad in a black cloak…
Biblical scholars and theologians use “antediluvian” to describe the world of Genesis between the fall from Eden and the flood. Literally meaning “before the flood,”…
Credit where it’s due: Hurry Up Tomorrow is the sort of fiasco that Canadian pop superstar The Weeknd has been concertedly building toward over several…
If nothing else, Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker dedicated to understanding how we live with technology, and his greatest strength is a willingness to confront…
Across five feature films to date, most of which exist within a liminal space located between fiction and documentary narrative, demarcated with blurred lines, Roberto…
At first, Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert of Namibia seems to be just another entry in what this writer is calling Millennium Mambo-core, after the growing yet…
“I hate ’love’ in my own language,” says the Norwegian music artist and novelist Jenny Hval in the title track from her album The Practice…
History — personal, political, and its inseparable intertwinement — is, perhaps, most truthfully realized when vividly expressed, not just recorded. Documentarian greats like Ken Burns…
Filled with the rhythm of a rock song and the visual language of a nightmare, Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight feels like the mix spun from…