What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is a documentary with an almost confounding resolve to simply document. Given the subject matter —…
There’s been an interesting spate of feminist, or at least female-led, westerns recently; there’s Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman, a dark film that suggests the only…
It shouldn’t surprise that a documentary tackling China’s population-curbing one-child policy, effectuated in the late 1970s and lasting until 2015, provides innately dramatic material, but…
A religious drama set among the Pentecostal snake handlers of Appalachia, there are any number of paths that Them That Follow could have taken to…
Serbian director Ognjen Glavonic’s The Load is so minimal and austere that its title – nominally referring to the cargo carried in the truck driven…
So what exactly ‘begins’ in Philippe Lesage’s Genesis? That’s a question that’s almost too deceptively simple to answer: love, of course (the film’s poster even…
Nobody knows bland, affluent white people quite like writer-director Bart Freundlich, a filmmaker who has made a career out of chronicling the interior struggles of…
After his eccentric, taskmaster father (Udo Kier) dies, Andy (Tye Sheridan) — a burly, brooding mass of tortured American masculinity — joins a renowned physician,…
James Longley’s Angels Are Made of Light is an essential document, chronicling several seasons at the Daqiqi Balkhi School in Kabul, Afghanistan. The remnants of conflict are…
Abel (Louis Garrel) has a dilemma, one that makes-up the entire emotional framework of A Faithful Man. Abel lusts after two equally beautiful (and deviously…
It can be difficult to wrap ones head around what ‘Mumblecore’ is today: a genuine movement ten-plus years ago, and one that once had so…
Writer-director Guy Nattiv’s Skin isn’t just a feature-length extension of Nattiv’s Oscar-winning short film, also called Skin; the 2018 short played out like the most…
In its attempts to chart the decaying values of a country in the midst of political turmoil, Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo is disruptive from the very…
An arch and wickedly funny portrait of American male masculinity in the 21st century, one could argue that writer-director Riley Stearns’s The Art of Self-Defense is…
Following in the footsteps of Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, and Steve McQueen, amongst others, Birmingham-born artist Richard Billingham makes the jump from the gallery to feature films…
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s documentary Honeyland opens with the image of a yellow-frocked figure, indistinct, walking a notched path that winds through a green sea of grass. It’s…
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…