In the Same Breath For a while, Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath makes for a fascinating companion piece to Ai Weiwei’s 2020 documentary CoroNation.…
All Light, Everywhere If it hadn’t already been claimed, a much more appropriate title for Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere would be The Act of…
Pleasure “Are you here for business or for pleasure?” “Pleasure.” Leaving her Swedish small-town life for the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, 19-year-old Linnéa…
Life in a Day 2020 Documentaries like Life in a Day 2020 practically cling with desperation to a concept of the universal. Such works insist…
John and the Hole Tapped by Cannes for its theoretical 2020 slate, John and the Hole carried a bit more intrigue than most films heading…
The Sparks Brothers For most of their fans and listeners, a first encounter with Sparks did not result in the assumption that the duo of…
CODA The title of Siân Heder’s sophomore feature is twofold: an acronym for the “child of deaf adults,” and the concluding passage or movement of…
Wong Ping’s Fables 2 The first of two fables in Wong Ping’s Fables 2 is entitled “Cow the Super-Rich.” It’s an amusing anti-capitalist tale about…
Nasir What’s immediately striking about Nasir, Arun Karthick’s sophomore feature, is the ebb-and-flow rhythm of its slice-of-life portraiture. Karthick immediately and consistently trains his camera…
Identifying Features Within a cinematic tradition that associates the violence of Mexico’s crime-infested northern border with the high-stakes machismo of drug cartels and CIA spies,…
The New Directors/New Films festival has emerged in recent years as a major player on the festival scene, programming such diverse heavy-hitters as Black Mother, An…
We at InRO aren’t immune for fall festival fatigue, and that means we too frequently pass over small festivals that deserve the attention. This year…
Ammonite Three years on from Francis Lee’s terrific gay drama, God’s Own Country, and the director has moved on from the romantic union of two…
Herself A patron of the British arts, Phyllida Lloyd’s transition from a director of theater to film could hardly have been more conspicuous. Her debut…
Black Bear In the debate between mimesis and anti-mimesis, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear proffers a third possibility — that life is art in organic…
On the Rocks “It must be very nice to be you.” That’s what Laura (Rashida Jones) says to her gadfly dad Felix (Bill Murray) late…
Point and Line to Plane How does one give shape to one’s experience, one’s grief? The question persists through the films of Canadian director Sofia…
Mandibles Perhaps the most unbefitting title to arrive in the middle of a global pandemic, Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles defies the current for two reasons. That…
Another week, another festival. For this year’s BFI London Film Festival, it’s business as usual, which is to say the unusual business of 2020 film…
Where many festivals this year have had to get creative in their exhibition format, Nightstream has taken that industrious spirit to a new level —…