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…
Michael Townsend, the Rhode Island artist at the center of Jeremy Workman’s documentary Secret Mall Apartment, knows that taking up space is a political act.…
Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky’s debut feature Rats! is a bit impossible to describe. There’s a story in there, somewhere, involving nuclear weapons, missing “hans”…
In his recent book Filmmakers Thinking, Adrian Martin quotes the German filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky at length regarding the “dialogues” that all filmmakers are engaged in;…
It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the person reading this review right now has never heard of Edward Burns, let alone seen any of his…
“You’re safe. You’re totally safe,” says Terry Masear to a small hummingbird named Wasabi in the opening moments of Every Little Thing. The documentary, directed…
Watching Disfluency feels a bit like being guided through a museum exhibit by a tour guide who won’t stop talking. There’s promising art to behold…