Charlie Birns, by his own account, set out to direct a documentary that would re-capture his transcendent experience in an acting class taught by self-styled…
Hansel Porras Garcia’s sophomore feature Tropical Park accomplishes a remarkable feat in cinema. In any other film, the depiction of a fraught encounter between a…
For an artist whose conceptions of cinema constantly evolved with the developing technologies and audiovisual forms, it’s a bit of a shame that Ken Jacobs’…
Austrian-born, U.S.-based filmmaker G. Anthony Svatek has an interest in human systems, and how they are put in place to manage forms of chaos that…
There was a time not so very long ago where, hard as it is to believe these days, East Asian cinema was commonplace among the…
“It’s amazing to be able to create something that others don’t understand at all.” So says an elderly woman to the aspiring punk singer-songwriter of…
“From the mind of The RZA” and “presented” by Quentin Tarantino comes One Spoon of Chocolate. In the film, Shameik Moore plays a veteran, washed…
In an old interview with David Ehrlich, filmmaker and critic Kent Jones recalls a conversation with Arnaud Desplechin in which the great French director told…
“Living out of a suitcase” and splitting her time between New York and Madrid, Isabel Sandoval arrived in Manila in early February. She returned to…
Maybe Our Land, Lucrecia Martel’s new film, reminds me of Edits, Chuquimamani-Condori’s 2025 laptop dump of DJ edits, simply because I listened to the latter…
Horror continually mines the dark crevices between belief and skepticism. Explorations of witchcraft, folklore, and the paranormal are fertile grounds for character-building, so that a…
At the beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length documentary, Our Land (originally titled Landmarks), we’re presented with satellite images of Earth. From this zoomed out…
In this dispatch: Heat, The Illusion…
Jacqueline Zünd’s documentary Heat takes place across the Persian Gulf, one of the hottest spots on planet Earth today. Though not because of the ongoing…
The redundant fatigue from the influx of Russo-Ukrainian war documentaries remedies itself if one begins to recognize their level of artistic excellence. One such effective…
In 2020, HBO began airing one of the funniest and most significant docuseries in the history of the form, How To With John Wilson, in…
The opening shot of Dutch director Jona Honer’s documentary Club Heaven plunges us into the heart of the “Playhouse” club in Chengdu. A perfectly symmetrical…
Although cinema is at its best when it gleefully breaks the rules, some operating procedures need to be in place when you embark upon an…
Director Chloé Robichaud’s film Two Women presents as a tale of sexual liberation, wherein two Montréal women trapped in sputtering marriages pursue casual sex that…
Arnaud Desplechin cares very little for narrative cohesion. In a career filled with elliptical, loose threads as films, Two Pianos finds the director at his…
The current acclaim for Canadian cinema is, like many attempts to promote a new wave, a snapshot of a rising generation that aside from nationality…