Yoshiyuki Okuyama’s 5 Centimeters Per Second is only on its face a romantic story, about a lovelorn boy and his lost childhood love. If only…
On October 11, 1985, during Back to the Future’s 15th week in theaters, while audiences reveled in Marty and Doc Brown’s escape from Libyan terrorists…
The pop music industry is one of single stories. Regardless of the language or nationality of the industry, pop musicians are essentially told to fit…
Ok class, raise your hands if you would be excited to watch a nearly three-hour film about chess? I’m sure there are plenty of In…
God, girlhood is tough. Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all experience of being a young girl; we all likely know this, but the diversity of youth…
In Victoria Hely-Hutchinson’s documentary Vacances, time is measured by changing bodies. As the summers roll by over the course of nine years, lines in backs…
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency opens with a bright red “WARNING. This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality and…
In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis radically upended the New College of Florida in an attempt to align the university with his party’s hyper-conservative ideologies,…
Behind-the-camera work can be thankless, especially if you’re a location scout. In The Scout, the debut feature from writer/director Paula González-Nasser, Sofia (Mimi Davila) lives…
The first 15 minutes of Take Off cite Hegel not once but twice. It goes without saying how unique this aspirational source is within the…
Catholicism and adolescence should, at least on paper, be natural bedfellows. One is a boundary-testing time of near-deranged horniness and rife with terrible decisions, whilst…
Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples takes place somewhere in the United Kingdom, most likely a studio somewhere near Bristol, though it may as well be mistaken…
What is “Buzz”? The murmur around a popular film at Sundance? The alarm from an angry bee, fly, gnat? The sultry purr of a sex…
Only his second feature-length film after maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (2021), Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People is the director’s least tangibly experimental project to…
If Los Angeles is the land of struggling actors languishing in food service — the sitcom Party Down plumbed this phenomenon for three seasons —…
With an education system as corrupt and ineffectual as that of the United States, stories of real teachers making a genuine difference are few and…
Writing about Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, critic Ali Karimnia observes that it is “a cinema that, rather than telling us what the world is,…
It’s a sign of great writing when you can identify everything you love and hate about a character, but can’t decide whether you love or…
Marianne Elliott is an extraordinary theater director. Modernist and (tastefully) ostentatious in her staging, she never loses sight of the soft, squishy human heart at…
Crows Are White is sharpest when its images expose what director Ahsen Nadeem’s narration would prefer to soften. It is least convincing when, at the…
Love takes miles. In 1977, PK Mahanandia, a 23-year-old street artist living in Delhi, met the girl he was sure he was destined to marry.…