Heimat Is a Space in Time is a film of palpable gravity but one that may always be more meaningful to Heise than to audiences. Heimat…
Director Carlo Mirabella-Davis recalls such singular voices as Antonio Campos and Michael Haneke with the visually rich, metaphorical horror film Swallow. Like a lot of…
The sixth feature film from Pema Tseden is a dream-inflected, almost Rashomon-like take on a road movie that uses the barren hills of the Kekexili…
A White, White Day is an uneven story of overcoming trauma that fails to muster the requisite pathos for its thematic material. Iceland’s Oscar entry this…
An utterly predictable narrative exercise, And Then We Danced salvages some intrigue in the celebration and presentation of its titular art. A familiar tale rears its head…
While Saint Frances manages to mine some rich thematic material, its standard lo-fi indie aesthetic fails to elevate. For his feature film debut, director Alex Thompson teams…
Tseden’s latest is a clever indictment of the ways that both religion and government seek to deny women their due agency. Tibetan director Pema Tseden’s artistic…
Patricio Guzmán’s latest documentary offers similar but waning insight to his two previous, more successful efforts. The Cordillera of Dreams is the third and final film…
After Midnight is an exercise in indie intentionality, seeking to upend genre convention but mustering only smug banality. Labels are always reductive and usually insulting. They…
Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest is a rhythmic, matter-of-fact portrait of economic compromise. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Earth, from the outset, frames its massive landscapes as sites of continual…
VHYes is a wannabe absurdist curiosity but is instead an interminable viewing experience. Jack Henry Robbins’ VHYes is the kitschy, post-ironic, pseudo-found footage 80’s pastiche the world didn’t…
The shallow characterizations at the core of Les Misérables dampen the effect of its incendiary anger. Ladj Ly’s debut feature may be called Les Misérables,…
An experimental documentary of modest means and sweeping scale, Chinese Portrait offers a scintillating snapshot of a rapidly changing nation. Director Wang Xiaoshuai assembled the…
Seberg is just the latest film to signal its interest in issues of racial injustice, and progressive commentary, only to counterproductively build itself around the travails…
The films of Jessica Hausner can be maddeningly opaque, but obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. Her newest film, Little Joe, makes a fascinating double feature…
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Chinonye Chukwu’s grim death row drama Clemency begins with a lethal injection gone wrong,…
There are fewer than 45 government-funded emergency ambulances in Mexico City — far from the sufficient number of vehicles needed to provide for the capital…
Beniamino Barrese’s The Disappearance of My Mother is a documentary portrait of Benedetta Barzini, the first Italian supermodel to appear on the cover of American…
It seems safe to assume that not a single person has ever asked for a dramatic take on 1991’s cult comedy Drop Dead Fred, in…
Light From Light is being billed as a paranormal ghost story, and while that description certainly isn’t untrue, it presents a conception far different from…
Of the many fictional characters Steve Bannon compares himself to in American Dharma — Col. Nicholson from The Bridge on the River Kwai and Falstaff from Chimes at Midnight —…