It’s often a fool’s errand to go searching for themes in a given festival program, but if there’s a common thread running through Future // Present, it’s…
Aaron Katz’s glossy, very surface-conscious mystery opens in high style with an upside-down shot of twilit palm trees, cool vaporwave beats easing the transition to…
Allure, the first film by Carlos and Jason Sanchez (Montreal brothers with nearly identical fine art photographer CVs), spins a thrillery setup concerning a kidnapping, obsession, and…
As its title suggests, transformation is the subject of Ashley McKenzie’s feature debut, Werewolf—a film that is at once empathetic and unsentimental. McKenzie follows Blaise (Andrew…
The name of Dotham, Alabama comes from Genesis and 2 Kings: The Dothan of the Bible is where Elisha sees his vision of flaming chariots, conjured…
The American Western — usually identified by its action, machismo, and its oftentimes flimsy portrayal of Native American genocide — has also always dealt with borders. The Mormons…
In the 1990s and 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa emerged as one of world cinema’s most accomplished and interesting filmmakers: Cure, Pulse, Bright Future, and Doppelganger (among others) are…
The Last Family details the life of painter Zdzislaw Beksinski (Andrzej Seweryn), and wastes no time trying to catch you off guard with “shocking”humor.” An aged Zdzislaw…
The closest thing to a religious presence in The Great Buddha+ is a towering statue of the divine being that sits in a factory run…
Beginning with a group of performers being prepped in a makeup trailer before being escorted onto a stage-managed, faux battleground, Sergey Loznitsa’s Donbass suggests a…
Commissioned as part of Nikkatsu’s line of Roman Porno reboots, and adherent to its rules, Sion Sono’s ANTIPORNO is, as its title suggests, a screed…
With Princess Cyd, Chicago-based director Stephen Cone extends his interest in exploring the push-pull of the mind, body and spirit, with a generous emphasis on the…
“YOU NEED TISSUES FOR YOUR ISSUES” reads a woman’s shirt near the start of Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind, the director’s second film from 2016,…
Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauian and Senegalese descent, knows the value of a good face. This is why he fills so many of Félicité’s frames…
Jennifer Reeder’s feature debut is a brisk, charming story of asserting one’s identity in the midst of cultural expectations. Zaynab (the charismatic Fawzia Mirza) works as…
Tackling the trickiest of transpositions, that of adapting a dialogue-driven one-act play to the big screen, Benedict Andrews’s Una takes on David Harrower’s Blackbird—and it mostly…
Following a woman on the Autism spectrum before her second marriage, Dina feels like a documentary that could have been rife with exploitation, and in lesser hands it…
In this modest second feature, Jang Woo-jin demonstrates a canny eye for separations between people and within space and time. Autumn, Autumn tells two stories neatly…
As a documentary film student newly arrived in America, director Nanfu Wang’s probing I Am Another You begins as she meets a charismatic, intentionally homeless 22-year-old…
Gina (Lindsay Burdge), a flight attendant, hooks up with Jérôme (Damien Bonnard), a mustachioed bartender at a Parisian strip-club, after her husband commits suicide (a…