There’s an undeniable novelty that introduces Thomas Hardiman’s directorial debut, Medusa Deluxe. On its surface, the film promises to be a lively, twisty — quite…
At first glance, there may be nothing necessarily wrong with Antoine Barraud’s third feature film, Madeleine Collins; on the contrary, it quickly evokes a certain…
For a work whose subject matter purports to straddle the lofty and permanent, its subject appears remarkably contingent. The Eternal Memory, Maite Alberdi’s latest documentary…
A trio of octogenarians have a close encounter of the third kind in Jules, director Marc Turtletaub’s high-concept dramedy that is, strangely enough, not the…
In Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, Juliette Binoche’s character, Marianne, is introduced as a credibly depressing symptom of the global economy. In her fifties and…
Early on in What Comes Around, Amy Redford’s sophomore feature (coming after a 15-year hiatus), it becomes clear that logic will be an absent player.…
Randall Park’s directorial debut, Shortcomings, is sure to draw immediate comparisons to Crazy Rich Asians, a film that made $238 million and was praised for…
Across diverse forms of media, artists have devised various modes of depicting oppression. Watching Clement Virgo’s stirring feature Brother, it’s the smallness of the characters…
Released back in 2015, filmmaker Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy was a bisected biopic of the brilliant but tormented musician Brian Wilson, whose preternatural gifts…
The career of Romanian director Paul Negoescu has not been easy to pin down. His debut feature, A Month in Thailand (2012), was a remarkable,…
Clocking in at a breezy 73 minutes, Kokomo City — which bagged audience awards at both the Sundance and Berlin film festivals — proves a…
Non-fiction scenarios and non-professional actors are often characterized as so rich and unpredictable that all a director needs to be is a receiver for what…
The past decade suggests an encroaching — or, perhaps at this point, arrived — renaissance in Indigenous art. Regardless of the medium, native voices are…
When talking about Mouchette, his acclaimed 1967 drama, Robert Bresson said that the put-upon titular character “offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found…
Like his (still-undistributed, in North America) previous film, 2017’s Walking Past the Future, Li Ruijun’s latest, Return to Dust (an official selection of this year’s…
Young filmmakers making gangster-adjacent genre films is a time-honored tradition — it’s a mode of moviemaking with a built-in propensity for ready-made conflict, violence, stylized…
“U.S. history is a branch of a larger tree of history… but it’s that covetous branch that thinks it’s the tree.” Proffered somewhere partway through…
There’s no denying the sheer aesthetic appeal of Laura McGann’s The Deepest Breath. Charting the mind-boggling freediving efforts of Alessia Zecchini and Stephen Keenan, the…
Savanah Leaf’s debut Earth Mama treats the viewer to a tender, moving portrait of a complicated Black woman. Leaf establishes the stakes early on: Gia…
Director Carolina Cavalli’s Italian import Amanda opens with the titular twenty-something protagonist attending a film screening alone on a Saturday night. Standing outside of the…