Ten minutes in and you would be forgiven for thinking that documentarian Marcus Lindeen has struck gold with The Raft, a seemingly ready-made story of pioneering…
The enduring impulse to defamiliarize — that is, to (re-)present something as novel or new — is at the heart of Peter Parlow’s The Plagiarists. Directed from…
Predicated on a plot that details a man with a troubled past finding his place in the world through his job at a warehouse market,…
This One’s For the Ladies promises to deliver the goods that a major studio flick like Magic Mike could never accomplish — namely naked, erect…
The Chambermaid, the first feature from actress-turned-theater-director-turned filmmaker Lila Aviles, centers on Eve (Gabriela Cartol), a luxury hotel cleaning lady working in Mexico City. Part of…
Early in Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, Morrison tells a story from her childhood about when she first came to understand…
Using animation to sensitize young audiences to the horrors in our world is not an altogether novel approach, particularly in the realm of international cinema…
An ongoing conflict that remains popular within the modern music industry is one between the signed artist and the controlling label that wishes to stifle…
Adapted from Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson’s long form poem of the same name, Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara skews largely sensationalist — to its…
There’s something of a red flag that should warn viewers just moments into Meeting Gorbachev of the documentary’s relative lack of cinematic austerity: the shimmering…
The Wandering Soap Opera manages to create the perfect portrait of a nation without culture, without guidance, lost in a post-dictatorial haze. Filmed in 1990…
The primary appeal of Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young is its seductive portrayal of a liminal state. Set in a bohemian commune in…
Diamantino, the brainchild of directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, comes out guns-a’-blazin’, with frenetic, intertwining, impossible-to-link story threads listed-out via voice-over and referencing (in…
“Sensuous,” “gorgeous, “evocative” — such descriptors are perhaps too easily applied to Ash Mayfair’s The Third Wife, a film that, from its opening frames, seems…
‘Batman of the barrio’ makes for an enticing logline, and Ben Hernandez Bray’s El Chicano presents itself as “the first Latino superhero movie.” But good…
Film history is chock full of men falling in love with the ‘whore with a heart of gold,’ either to the effect of their own…
The Wind marks director Emma Tammi’s first foray into narrative cinema, a step away from her documentarian work and directly into the foreboding wilderness of…
Yuen Woo-ping’s Ip Man “side story” is a perfectly appropriate addition to this franchise, for both better and for worse. Master Z: Ip Man Legacy serves as a direct…
Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun has the noblest of intents, making it almost impossible not to admire it in the abstract. It’s also hard…
As a foolproof, crowd-pleasing subject, you can’t go wrong with dogs and their owners. So it’s not hard to see the appeal of veteran Dutch…