Last Things — the latest from Chicago-based experimental artist Deborah Stratman — begins with a voiceover which reads aloud the introductory prose from Clarice Lispector’s…
A pervasive distrust has infiltrated a German middle school in Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge, roiling both the students and the faculty. Insinuations fly freely, along with…
Michel Franco is a director who approaches unadorned tragedy with great familiarity; not as a shock or an inconvenience, but as the organizing principle of…
In the pantheon of late-19th to early-20th century intellectuals, there are few with such starkly opposing views as Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. At most…
The latest piece of cotton candy in the ever-prolific François Ozon’s filmography, The Crime is Mine (Mon Crime) finds him restaging a 1934 play by…
There’s a pretty standard axiom about “knowing your audience” when it comes to writing; or in this case, documenting a renowned filmmaker. Cyril Leuthy’s Godard…
Scanning the logline alone of Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is enough to engender a double-take, although less for its audaciousness and more out of an…
An experiment of replacing craftspeople, necessary in most film productions, with an entourage of artists, The Peasants is a pictorially impeccable film. Artistic partners (and…
The last decade has seen a dramatic metamorphosis of Chinese documentary. The vibrant independent and zero-budget documentary ecosystem of the 2000s — from which ambitious…
Writer-director Fabián Hernández’s miserablist slice-of-life drama A Male concerns Carlos (Dylan Felipe Ramírez Espitia), a young teenager navigating the mean streets of Bogotá, Colombia. Left…
An easy bit of advice to give to any filmmaker who tries, whether with journalistic integrity or well-meaning folksy soapboxery, to make a film about…
Stop me if this synopsis sounds familiar: A mousy young woman from an outlandishly dysfunctional family finally snaps and unleashes vengeance upon her small New…
The overwrought, overexplained, overedited maximalism of modern-day blockbuster cinema is a somewhat dumbed-down version of what film theorist Tom Gunning championed early, non-narrative silent cinema…
It’s always frustrating when the awesome beauty of manicured, ornate spectacle gets caught in a quagmire of its own ideological reduction. When aesthetics, so carefully…
Between the birth of the civil rights movement and the present dearth of ideological nuance, no small credit should be given to the former for…
We all know Star Wars came out in May of 1977 and was an immediate sensation, well on its way to becoming a cultural touchstone.…
Can the blatant artificiality of cinema fill the gaping void of reality? Acclaimed Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s resilient but consistently hurting Four Daughters asks…
In a small village in Jharkhand, east India prowls a tiger; this tiger is misogyny, and its fellow tigers constitute the broader institutions of patriarchy.…
An example of the laziness rife in digital filmmaking, Erige Sehiri’s Under the Fig Trees employs a haphazard handheld cinematography that echoes the immediacy of…
Out of John Edward Williams’ three seminal novels — a trio of recently rediscovered bildungsromans about hapless young men who live uneventful lives (save for…