Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
As director, writer, and co-leading actor of All That’s Left of You, Cherien Dabis would have taken on a significant artistic challenge no matter the…
It is tempting, in times like these, to ascribe to an archetype its particular incarnation, to historicize it one way or another. Such might be…
“The voices on the phone are real.” So states the caption that appears on screen early in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab,…
That George W. Bush’s war on terror was a farce is all but written history. The craven hunt for oil under the guise of WMDs…
Pedro Lemebel, the writer who chronicled Chilean queer life throughout the fall of the Pinochet regime, the rise of democracy, and the AIDS epidemic, proclaimed…
A life’s linearity is only a biproduct of meticulously constructed narrative. In hindsight, things seem straightforward: clinging to your older sister’s pantlegs, you survive a…
Poverty and opulence, the pastoral and the high-tech, war and peace, childhood and adulthood. Opposite ends of a variety of spectrums meet, and sometimes clash,…
Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s last film, 2023’s Green Border, was a fact-based drama about migrants who were lured to Belarus by false promises of asylum,…
The mental health epidemic has taken root globally, but only in the U.S. is it likelier to do so behind the barrel of a gun.…
In Japan, where customs and a sturdy veneer of politeness greatly determine how people interact with one another, there is a strong emphasis on propriety,…
“There comes a time when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.” When Sara Jane Moore attempted and…
“The year you were born,” reads the opening title card to Palestine 36. It’s a daunting prescription that also invites the viewer into the story.…
Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a sprawling, expansive work that functions simultaneously as familial remembrance, a documentary on Black intellectualism in the 20th and…
It’s June 1993 in rural Nigeria. Remi and his younger brother Akin (real-life brothers Chibuike Marvelous Egbo and Godwin Egbo) are bickering, eating food and…
Silence — like its two unassuming allies, stillness and slowness — is often positioned as a response to mainstream cinema’s reckless noisiness. But contemporary indie…
Zodiac Killer Project is, put simply, a strange undertaking. Charlie Shackleton’s expansively stripped-down documentary emerged from a thwarted attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012…
Sylvia Chang has been one of the more under-appreciated forces in international film for almost 50 years now. Beginning her career as an actress in…
Some day, our future will be someone else’s past. Arco, the titular co-protagonist of illustrator, comic book author, and short film director Ugo Bienvenu’s debut…
“People are cheap, water is expensive.” So says Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the mysterious and curiously educated drifter who stumbles into Ali’s (Ekin Koç) withered…