Any casual viewer of arthouse cinema from the past decade is likely to experience immediate déjà vu upon sitting down to watch Savage House: what does…
Ryuya Suzuki’s Jinsei is clearly a labor of love. Completed over an 18-month period, Suzuki wrote, directed, hand-drew, and scored the film, his feature debut,…
In 2017’s Summer 1993, director Carla Simón’s feature debut, a young girl is sent to live with her mother’s family in Barcelona after her mother’s…
Sebastián Lelio’s The Wave swiftly announces itself as a musico-political spectacle. Music as activism, activism as music, but mostly — and sorely — musical activism.…
Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker…
On its surface, Haifa al-Mansour’s Unidentified is a crime thriller that follows a recent divorcee, Nawal (Mila Al Zahrani), as her true crime obsession emboldens…
John Early is a tightrope artist. There’s little about his debut feature, Maddie’s Secret, that should work. With the DNA of a comedy sketch, Maddie’s…
Girls Like Girls is gay, and (mostly) proud of it. The film is Hayley Kiyoko’s adaptation of her novel of the same title, which was…
A moment of peculiar poignancy opens Erige Sehiri’s sensitive, if somewhat unremarkable, Promised Sky. A young girl is being bathed by three women as she…
In this gluttonous age of streaming, where art of all forms is cannibalized by the film industry in pursuit of content, the more particular art…
At first glance, Adam Carter Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline is the sort of film online cinephiles love to bemoan “they don’t make anymore,” a grounded crime…
Another World offers a reprieve from Western visions of a dreary, Catholic purgatory. “Another World” — both the film’s title and its proper name for…
Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under…
The pursuit of meaning in life is a negatory one. The more one seeks understanding, the more mystery one discovers. The more one learns to…
A woman, beautiful and a touch removed, travels to Switzerland from Argentina to accept an award. She throws the glass statuette in the bathroom trash,…
In an age of rapid acceleration and environmental decay, the act of preservation remains a preeminent concern — not only for the ecologist, but also…
On November 1 and 2, 2001, then-28-year-old Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari visited Gaza, and left with about two hours and forty minutes worth of MiniDV…
The debut feature from Spanish director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias is a different kind of coming-of-age story, one that finds its young protagonist Cata (Zoe Stein)…
At the start of Manas, Tielle’s world seems boundless, idyllic. Tielle, short for Marcielle, is a 13-year-old girl played with astounding maturity by Jamilli Correa.…
In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13,…
The gifted prodigy who’s gone to seed is a time-honored trope that will never leave us because it flatters both filmmakers and actors. A streetwise…