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…
To director Tommaso Santambrogio, to tell a story about people, you ought to tell the story of the places they inhabit. That could be why…
Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel, these…
Marcello Mio, probably the first movie to appear in Cannes competition with the word “nepo baby” in its script, is part of an increasing tendency…
From Ground Zero is an anthology of 22 stories from Gaza curated by Rashid Masharawi. The shorts range from straightforward documentations of daily life under…
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 real…
Grand Theft Hamlet is not what it says on the tin. Opening shots of landscape simulacra make readily apparent the aesthetic promise of staging a…
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 gamut…