Giving Birth to a Butterfly, the feature-length debut from director/co-writer Theodore Schaefer, opens with a middle-aged woman laying out two seemingly identical christening gowns, preparing…
It’s a film like Monica that offers you space to question the legitimacy of our major film festivals’ competition branches, a film where only industrial…
A wonderfully realized portrait of the alienation experienced by both a mother and her child, Italian filmmaker Emanuele Crialese’s brilliantly colorful and touching L’Immensita revels…
Writer-director Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl opens with 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) dancing with her church’s worship troupe. It’s clear that dancing brings Jem…
A scattershot commentary on the film industry from writer-director-star Charlie Day (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), the kindest thing one can say about Fool’s Paradise…
Inescapable during the ‘90s and ‘00s yet rendered near instantly obsolete by the iPhone and its assorted imitators, the BlackBerry smartphone feels less like a…
Actress-turned-director Manuela Martelli’s debut feature, Chile ’76, is a thriller built upon the expectations of upper-class marital melodrama. Carmen (a subtle but strong Aline Küppenheim)…
In discussing what constitutes homophobia, queer theorist Eve Sedgwick posits that “the number of persons or institutions by whom the existence of gay people is…
Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? comes courtesy of Studio Canal and Working Title, two production companies who have created a cottage…
Ashley McKenzie’s debut feature, Werewolf, already suggested a talent to watch in its refracted take on the addiction/relationship drama. While its dramatic sense felt stuck…
Joachim Lafosse’s The Restless begins with a stranding at sea. Damien (Damien Bonnard), a rising art star at the beginning of a manic episode, jumps…
Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Eight Mountains opens with a young man’s voiceover accompanying a series of natural Italian…
Jalmari Helander’s Sisu is a lean piece of filmmaking with a simple pitch: a one-man army violently dispatches a handful of Nazis at the tail-end…
Unfolded in twelve chapters and split into two parts, Trenque Lauquen includes across its 250-minute runtime a story of a missing woman possibly gone mad,…
Documentaries don’t get much more hybrid than Dry Ground Burning, the new film from Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta. It’s a film about a gang…
As its title would have it, Plan 75 has a broad purview over the implementation and implications of its alternate, not-too-distant future. In this future,…
After Jerry Seinfeld and his “What’s the deal?” color commentary on the silliness of the quotidian struck gold in Seinfeld, comedians started to habitually appear…
The stepmother is typically an outsider role in literature. Not so in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children. Adapted from Romain Gary’s novel, Your Ticket Is…
A beguiling amalgam of classic opera sensibility, modern dance performance, and Badlands-esque, lovers-on-the-run romantic tragedy, Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is a deeply idiosyncratic and electrifying film…
In July 2020, The New York Times published an article by composer and music composition professor Marcos Balter that criticized the notion of calling Joseph…