El Planeta This year, New Directors/New Films opens with Amalia Ulman’s debut feature film El Planeta, a cool choice for MoMA and Film at Lincoln…
It’s been only a short four months since the postponed 2020 edition of New Directors/New Films wrapped up, but the fest is back on schedule…
Between Dog and Wolf In Irene Gutiérrez’s Between Dog and Wolf, the relationship between past and present — and future — is vertiginous. We are…
The Spine of Night The Spine of Night is a whole lot of movie. Despite the film’s relatively straightforward fantasy logline — sorcerer goes mad…
Fucking with Nobody For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is a…
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched In 2012, writer and film programmer Kier-La Janisse published House of Psychotic Women, a tremendous and essential text, part autobiography,…
Gaia There’s an ancient, malevolent force living in the depths of the forest in director Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia, a psychedelic bit of eco-horror that finds nature…
After being forced to cancel 2020’s festival in the eleventh hour in the wake of Covid’s proliferation across the U.S., SXSW returns in 2021. Adopting…
Lovers A deceptively boilerplate film noir with shades of drab eroticism, Nicole Garcia’s Lovers belies an astonishing sublimation of its cultural and existential milieux. Premiering…
Love Affair(s) Like several films in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema lineup, Love Affair(s) is a title that was meant to premiere at Cannes 2020,…
Petite Maman Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed on a precipice of some essential awareness, riding the ebbs and flows of emerging self-knowledge, and arriving…
Bloodsuckers In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori…
Social Hygiene Retreating from the weight of actions into the weightlessness of words, Denis Côté’s latest finds a rambunctious solace in the oratorial. Serving possibly…
Introduction It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo, so often noted for his diptych structures, seems to have moved into a new triptych phase…
Nous Cutting across Paris from the north to the south, the RER B is a commuter rail that shuttles passengers to and from the city…
The Girl and the Spider Like their previous collaboration, 2013’s The Strange Little Cat, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider is best…
Taking new shape this year, the Berlinale kicks off today in its virtual version, running for the rest of this week before hibernating until June…
Black Medusa In a thankless role as one of the most morose femmes fatales in memory, Nour Hajri plays Nada, a (mostly) mute office worker…
Bipolar The myth of Orpheus seems to tell us that in the face of overwhelming grief, the hardest thing to do is have faith that…
As We Like it The idea of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, set in an ultra-modern Taipei with an all-female cast, certainly sounds…