Julia Murat’s Pendular is film filled with impressive compositions: it opens with its central couple — credited as He (Rodrigo Bolzan) and She (Raquel Karro) —…
Distant Constellation focuses on a Turkish assisted living facility, whose barren halls visualize the tragic loneliness afflicting the residents, members of a forgotten generation whose…
Director Antonio Mendez-Esparza’s Life and Nothing More is a minimalist portrait of mother-and-son strife, but that emotional center is contextualized by a larger exploration of…
No one would likely suggest that the dialogue and interactions in Ted Fendt’s previous films (comprising three shorts and 2016’s 61-minute debut feature, Short Stay) were naturalistic, or…
With Caniba, the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory duo Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor turn their typically assured lens on Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who was deported from Paris in…
Vacillating between brutality, mysticism, and comedy, Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch offers a cinematic approximation of a traditional African fairy tale; it tells the story…
Robert Greene (Actress, Kate Plays Christine) continues his string of remarkable documentaries with Bisbee ’17, an account of the town of Bisbee, Arizona coming to…
Anime visionary Masaaki Yuasa’s first feature since his 2004 breakthrough Mind Game (though kid-friendly Lu Over the Wall made it to the U.S. first), The…
Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance is one of the most idiosyncratic feature debuts at this year’s NDNF. As with Ambrose’s NDNF-programmed short film Spiral Jetty, the scenario here is rife…
Minding the Gap begins by opaquely tracing the lives of three skateboarding high schoolers — including the film’s director, Bing Liu — in their economically…
Carlo de los Santos Arias‘s Cocote moves from a wealthy estate in Santo Domingo to the town of Oviedo, using a personal tale of revenge to examine political, religious,…
Valérie Massadian’s follow-up to her acclaimed (and still undistributed) 2011 debut Nana is precisely controlled, but without ever resorting to a clinical distance from its subject.…
Combining absurdist horror with social realism, Good Manners takes the werewolf fable and deconstructs it within the context of modern Brazilian society, taking into account…
In Xavier Legrand’s Custody, viewers may get the sense that instead of the domestic drama this has been billed as, what they’re in fact watching is something much closer…
Araby opens with a teenage boy biking home to take care of his sick younger brother, his parents nowhere in sight. He spends the next…
Denis Côté’s A Skin So Soft is the kind of documentary that lives and dies by its subject: here, the niche subculture of bodybuilding as seen…
Discovering Sara Driver’s No Wave narratives You Are Not I and Sleepwalk during an Anthology Film Archives retrospective of her work several years ago was…
As InRO’s Lawrence Garcia put it, the best thing about film festivals is seeing something that will completely surprise you — and he and I definitely…
Michel Hazanavicius has somehow made a relatively successful career out of feebly imitating established genre tropes or broadly recreating old forms of filmmaking, with The Artist being…
Above all else, Andrew Haigh has proven himself a deeply empathic artist; whether tackling 21st century queer identity (Looking, Weekend) or the devolution of a decades-long relationship…