Vacation in Malia on the Greek island of Crete, a British tourist hub that might as well be hedonism incarnate, doesn’t end well for the…
Disco Boy, the debut feature film from Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese, marks an interesting moment for arthouse cinema. Abbruzzese offers up an edgelord take on…
Molly McGlynn’s sophomore feature, Fitting In explicitly reveals its core conceit from the very beginning, opening with two quotes on a symbolically pink-colored background: the first,…
Director and co-writer Alex Schaad has made a bold gamble with his new film Skin Deep, taking what is essentially an ‘80s-style body-swap premise and…
The virtues of Danish director Nikolaj Arcel’s new feature, The Promised Land, are those of old-school Hollywood studio pictures. The film is scrupulously well-constructed in…
Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s debut feature, Mambar Pierrette, opens with the mundane rhythms of domestic work. Mambar (Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat), a seamstress in the city…
Where have all the taboo romances gone? Admittedly, the trailer for Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl didn’t inspire much hope for their return, particularly since…
In Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, the protagonist — a young office worker named Fran (Daisy Ridley) — leads a scheduled life both…
From the first moments of Tótem, it’s easy to think about Lucas Dhont, which is never a good thing. Like Dhont’s recently released Close, Lila…
Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen’s most impressive career achievement to-date might have come during the 2013 Golden Horse Awards, when his debut feature, Ilo Ilo, won…
Most religions around the world have a flood story. Whether it’s Noah’s Ark, the manvantara-sandhya in Hinduism, or the Cheyenne saga of the Great Flood,…
Apolonia, Apolonia chronicles 13 years from filmmaker Lea Glob’s first encounter with the titular protagonist to the present day. Initially conceived as a project for…
It’s become a cliche to point out the cliche of the arthouse festival darling that amounts to essentially two hours of a marginalized person getting…
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…