Happening Early on in Audrey Diwan’s Golden Lion–winning feature, Happening, a young woman is singled out in a classroom, unable to answer her professor’s query…
Sharp Stick Though she’s been away from the film festival circuit for 11 years at this point, there’s no doubt that the career path Lena…
The Cathedral After a series of accomplished shorts and one medium-length feature, the magnificently opaque Notes on an Appearance, Ricky D’Ambrose has returned with The…
Procession Certain films allow cinema to display its unbridled capacity for humanity. Certain films can truly change lives, as hyperbolic as that may sound. Robert…
Burning Vividly illustrating Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” wildfires, which raged off and on from June 2019 into May 2020, Eva Orner’s new non-fiction film Burning…
Listening to Kenny G Saxophonist Kenneth Bruce Gorelick aka Kenny G was, at one time, possibly the most well-known jazz musician in the world (he…
On the festival circuit, documentaries — at least those not directed by Frederick Wiseman or Errol Morris — too easily are overlooked when programmed next…
The juggernauts of the fall festival season — Venice, TIFF, NYFF — cast a long shadow, which means that smaller autumn festivals too often get…
Parallel Mothers If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short The Human Voice hinted at a freshly energized director liberated from the burden of expectations, then his latest…
The French Dispatch For better or for worse, there are few working American auteurs whose visual stamps are as broadly and immediately recognizable as Wes…
Red Rocket It’s been far too long since we’ve been graced with a legitimate performance from Simon Rex a.k.a Dirt Nasty, the most esteemed white…
The Tragedy of Macbeth The Coens excel in films that flaunt a superficial mastery of genre, form, and cinematic grammar, all to arrive at intentionally…
Relative to other prestigious annual film festivals, NYFF typically operates — like due to its situation within the calendar year — as more of a…
After Blue (Dirty Paradise) Bertrand Mandico’s new lo-fi whatsit After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is wildly ambitious, extremely beautiful, and maddeningly dull. In the film’s unspecified…
Dear Chantal After something of a breakout with last year’s delightful meta feature Fauna, Nicolás Pereda returns with Dear Chantal, a short created as part…
The Eyes of Tammy Faye The rise of evangelism has had no small impact on the cultural and political dynamics of America today, having —…
The Rescue Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a knack for humanizing the most extreme situations and conditions on Earth. 2015’s Meru documented Chin’s…
Memoria Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival…
The Guilty Antoine Fuqua has made a career out of directing populist, middlebrow fare that seeks nothing more than to entertain audiences for a few…
Titane What is the role of “transgressive” art in an ostensibly liberal society? Or, to put it another way: In a cultural context where the…