In Halfdan Ullman Tøndel’s single-location psychodrama Armand, the titular character is both an elephant in the room and a structuring absence from it. The…
Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has made, really, one kind of film for the majority of his career: decadent exercises in excess that observe the absurdity…
With his 2019 debut Saint Frances, Alex Thompson offered up a strong resume. It wasn’t a film that entirely worked, but it was rich…
Universal Language opens on a static wide shot outside a French language school in snowy Winnipeg. We see the teacher grumpily trudge in late.…
To director Tommaso Santambrogio, to tell a story about people, you ought to tell the story of the places they inhabit. That could be…
Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel,…
Marcello Mio, probably the first movie to appear in Cannes competition with the word “nepo baby” in its script, is part of an increasing…
From Ground Zero is an anthology of 22 stories from Gaza curated by Rashid Masharawi. The shorts range from straightforward documentations of daily life…
The best thing that can be said for co-writer/director Þórður Pálsson’s debut feature film The Damned is that it looks and feels like a…
Grand Theft Hamlet is not what it says on the tin. Opening shots of landscape simulacra make readily apparent the aesthetic promise of staging…
If simplicity forms the premise of Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s Love Me, subtlety, however, is the last thing to constitute its payoff. Taking a…
From the summer of 2019 to the winter of 2023, Basel Adra — along with co-directors Yuval Abraham and Handan Ballal — documented how…
The village schoolteacher, taciturn but possessed of intellectual passions, plays a newly delivered recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” for his class, most of…
Bollywood-sanctioned social-issue dramas — competently made, left-leaning rebuttals to some of the most incompetently made right-wing propagandist dramas — tend to prioritize fierce rebellion…
Over the past century, Alexandre Dumas’ classic adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo has undergone literally dozens of film and television adaptations, finding…
The key word in the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is “sorrows,” translated from the German Leiden, which…
When Black September, a fringe militant offshoot of the Palestinian liberation movement, took 11 Israeli nationals hostage, murdering all of them within 24 hours…
It’s a bit of a shame that Kaveh Daneshmand’s new film Endless Summer Syndrome comes to us in the wake of Catharine Breillat’s Last…