Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to find…
If there’s one place in the world you’d want to make your debut, it’s France. Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow opens with a string of company…
Contemporary indie cinema may lack in quality, but it absolutely does not lack in the quantity of up-and-coming filmmakers majorly taking inspiration from the grainy…
In this day and age of IP-driven slopbusters, any film that dares to respond to a pre-existing intellectual property is worthy. Responding requires the filmmaker,…
Jonathan Majors is poised to become a household name this year, with high-profile roles in upcoming installments of the MCU and extended Rocky franchises due…
The most experimental regional cinema in the world might belong to the Arab Levant. As a region destabilized by a non-Indigenous oppressive neighbor for virtually…
In The Actor, memory pulls at the neck of Paul Cole (André Holland) like a diving tether that threatens to snap at every turn of…
In the opening scene of Who by Fire, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s latest feature, a car pulls over along a highway for a brief rest…
Bruce LaBruce, the more consistent enfant terrible of Canadian cinema, begins his pornographic Teorema reformation, The Visitor, with direct quotation from Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of…
Despite films such as Exotica, The Adjuster, and The Sweet Hereafter capturing the attention of a global audience in the 1990s, Atom Egoyan has never…
There have been many movies about baseball, that most American of sports — it is axiomatic. They can be nostalgic, romantic, or even, increasingly, tech-inflected…
Shula (Susan Chardy) makes an early impression in Rungano Nyoni’s newest film, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Driving home from a fancy dinner party, adorned…
Thoughtful film curation asks us to consider films in a new light. Alexander Horwath knows this better than most, having served as director of the…
Discerning between the annals and chronicles of yesteryear on one hand, and modern records of history on the other, the historian Hayden White posited a…
Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of…
A few key components of Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down, his full-length directorial debut, may bring to mind another small-scale Irish drama that recently brought…
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 six-year-old…
Filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has made, really, one kind of film for the majority of his career: decadent exercises in excess that observe the absurdity of…
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 in…
Universal Language opens on a static wide shot outside a French language school in snowy Winnipeg. We see the teacher grumpily trudge in late. Once…