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…
Implicit to the challenge “how do you want to live?” is the corollary: “how do you want to die?” This is the question at the…
Signe Baumane’s films are deeply personal endeavors, peppered with enough humor to grant them an easy charm. Importantly, her animation is distinct, inspired by Stasys…
Rebecca Miller’s films often find their core humanity in their characters’ dysfunction: motional tumult, isolation and enmeshment, neuroses and quirky pathologies, all swirling in a…
In C.J. Obasi’s latest film, the small, relatively isolated village of Iyi is overseen by Mama Efe (Rita Edochie), the group’s intermediary who lives in…
Film is a collection of stills, yet rarely is film still; in the empire of the moving image, action and reaction reign supreme. But action…
As climate change continues its steady march toward apocalyptic crescendo, its devastating effects are becoming more and more visible. In 2022, the United States alone…
Already an acclaimed editor on films such as Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light & Post Tenebras Lux and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, as well as an actress…
Director Kiohara Yui’s last feature, Our House — which debuted in 2017, and which this writer briefly reviewed here at InRO when it played the…
Though they lived a millennium and a half apart, Aristotle and Dante Alighieri shared a conception of love that gave rise to most of humanity’s…