What really is the Circle of Life for people (and animals) not comfortably positioned inside the perfectly calibrated version of Disneyland? Do the laws and…
While hardly the first to do it, Richard Linklater’s masterful execution of the walk-and-talk two-hander with 1995’s Before Sunrise ushered in a wave of similarly…
There’s a certain futility to any critical appraisal of a film like Jim Hosking’s third feature, Ebony & Ivory. That’s not to say there’s a…
Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her approach…
What can we understand as agency, for individuals placed into contexts that are fabricated in dehumanizing forms? How does the capacity for someone to willfully…
A goat gives birth; a paraplegic man’s soul leaves his body. In between, life and the flesh are one. Such appears to be the order…
Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s fascination…
When Smoke Signals arrived in U.S. theaters on the eve of Independence Day, 1998, few could anticipate the wave of Native American art that would…
Imbued with plenty of allure and the potential for surprise, friendly get-togethers and familial gatherings in cinema sustain such an appeal that they never outright…
Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré have amassed a remarkable body of work, and “body” is certainly an apt descriptor. Their intimate and playful films are…
With The Dells, director Nellie Kluz delivers a work of nonfiction that exists in some strange space between shifts at the “Shore Store” from Jersey…
What Judaism has become in its projection into a popular culture is indisputably a messy construct, to speak in minimizing terms. Putting aside the immediacy…
On the most basic level, Graham Swon’s second feature, An Evening Song (for three voices), could be called a pre-war domestic melodrama, a gothic mystery,…
History — personal, political, and its inseparable intertwinement — is, perhaps, most truthfully realized when vividly expressed, not just recorded. Documentarian greats like Ken Burns…
There’s a deadpan finality in the titular utterance of Iair Said’s first fiction feature, a contrived despondency passing off as statistical fact. In Most People…
Asog’s ambitions are endless and anxious. The movie, crafted by Filipino-Canadian comedian and director Sean Devlin, is a gutsy dyad of narrative and documentary work…
In a movie titled A Normal Family, one thing can be certain: the family is obligated to abnormality. Hur Jin-ho’s newest film, an adaptation of…
If the new indie neo-noir Gazer feels familiar, riffing on any number of classic thrillers as well as newer models like Memento and Too Late,…
More than ever, questions of form and the constitution of cinema swirl, boundaries challenged or collapsing regularly in a present where visual media is dominated…
Over the past few years, much has been written about the undeniable wave of “Covid films,” narratives molded by lockdowns, themes shaped by isolation, and…