A frontier western without any ontologically stable sense of indigeneity or the homestead, Pablo Aparo’s The Victors is a film that resists the easy binaries…
Like his previous feature, which opens with a 1988 Coca-Cola ad, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon begins with another vintage commercial — or, at least, a…
Dedicating more attention to the practicalities and criminal underbelly of the farm-to-table honey industry than certainly any fiction film before it, Andrew Patterson’s The Rivals…
Relative to its paltry budget, 2001’s Super Troopers, the second film from American comedy troupe Broken Lizard (consisting of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme,…
The critical concept of intersectionality, like “wokeness” or “critical race theory,” has been evacuated of its actual meaning by bad-faith bloggers and the conservative commentariat.…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
In 1970, Robb Moss took a semester off from Berkeley and started wandering to wherever he could crash, first out to a friend’s farm in…
American independent filmmaker and cinematographer Rob Tregenza broke onto the scene with 1988’s Talking to Strangers, a somewhat Jarmuschian dramedy that was notable for being…
It’s a fair response for one to give less importance to mainstream directors when they downplay their themes or politics in interviews, for if the…
Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die is the Palestinian filmmaker and archivist’s cinematic “answer” to the pioneering Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s invitation to collaborate,…
The main narrative engine, if there’s any to speak of, in Serra’s only other documentary, Afternoons of Solitude, was about trapping its subject in three…
In this excerpt: Donkey Princess…
Few worlds in cinema are as unmistakable as those of Chilean visual-art virtuosos Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, whose astonishing craft is matched by the…
Representation does not equal inclusion. With ostensibly good intentions and plenty of compassion, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s attempt at telling the story of refugee…
The inline skate is a useful metaphor for the life of Alex (Ani Mesa-Perez), the young woman on the cusp of adulthood in Erin Vassilopoulos’…
The aesthetics of liminality, arising from online images and storytelling revolving around emptied public spaces and mediated encounters with the uncanny, have lately penetrated cinema.…
In his most recent short The Wind, One Brilliant Day, Ben Rivers takes on a poem-in-translation by the Spanish modernismo writer Antonio Machado, né Antonio…
In this dispatch: July Reviews, Interviews…
Something I learned over many years working in restaurants is that there are no cooks that work in them, no servers, no bartenders, no hosts…
Troubled souls trapped: the parameters of a typical Claire Denis narrative are rarely complex. Beau Travail’s French Foreign Legion soldiers were confined to their base…
Kent Jones has long been one of cinema’s greatest thinkers, so to simply refer to him as a director seems a gross oversimplification for what…