Since his emergence on the periphery of the “New French Extremity” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bruno Dumont has continued to carve out…
Independent American filmmaking in the 1970s features many showcases of distinctive actor-director relationships. One of them: Joan Micklin Silver and her many great actors, including…
In the 1980s, a loose-knit group of Canadian filmmakers began producing and directing independent films that gained national recognition around an aesthetic of kitchen-sink realism…
Universal Language is, at its core, a community portrait. Matthew Rankin’s second feature was co-written and imagined by friends and collaborators Pirouz Namati and Ila…
Joshua Oppenheimer was made famous by two recursive exercises of direct cinema that saw him interrogate, through both performance and observation, the personal and collective…
Imagine being seated for a program of experimental films at a prestigious film festival. The room is packed with people who are willing to watch…
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are very serious about film. Film itself, that is, and particularly the consumer-ready format of Super-8 that at one point…
Across three features Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most vital contemporary voices in American cinema. After the positive reception to his…
Among cinephiles, Guy Maddin has long reigned with the celebration and consolation of being “the most accessible avant-gardist.” Since breaking out of obscurity with Tales…
It’s been hard for me to describe Jinho Myung’s debut feature Softshell (2024) ever since it premiered at New/Next Film Festival on the first weekend…
Ghosts of workers lost to corporate violence in Jakarta and Korea; a future media archaeologist picking through Indonesia’s fossilized e-waste; sand miners under the watch…
Sofia Bohdanowicz has always been a filmmaker unafraid to mine the uncomfortable depths of her own, and her family’s, history. Across 10 years of shorts…
Aaron Schimberg’s third feature, A Different Man, is a genre-bending character portrait of Edward (Sebastian Stan, wearing a prosthetic mask), a lonely and failed actor…
Among the boldest of the great Argentine films that emerged at the start of the 2000s was Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut La Libertad, a film…
2024 has been the most prolific year of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s career; last February he presented at the Berlinale Chime, his long-awaited comeback to the atmospheric…
With four features and twice as many short films under his belt, writer-director Kazik Radwanski has become one of the leading lights of Canadian cinema.…
Pascal Plante’s third feature, Red Rooms, premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, before screening to both critical and popular acclaim at Fantasia, where it…
To its considerable credit, Stephen Soucy’s recent documentary, Merchant Ivory (2024), resists the tendency toward hagiography. It’s an understandably tempting opportunity, composed as the film…
Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez premiered their new film, Invention, at Locarno last month, not quite sure what kind of life or reception it would…
Nathan Silver is perhaps best known for his prodigious output, releasing nine feature films period of 2012 to 2019. His prolificness is made all the…
Zach Clark’s films embody so many of the inspiring qualities of great low-budget filmmaking: scrappy, rough-and-ready production values stretched to feel more expensive than they…