“Toys are too preoccupied with fun,” Alejandro (Julio Torres) declares in a cover letter to Hasbro during the opening of Torres’ debut feature film…
Hollywood film scholar Thomas Schatz’s essay “Film Genre and the Genre Film” describes our relationship with the film genre as both static and dynamic.…
Part of a generation of First Nations filmmakers that also includes Rachel Perkins (Radiance, Bran Nue Dae), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country,…
Chinese-Korean director Zhang Lu has been a bit of a slow burn in the West. Despite having directed 12 feature films since 2003, only…
Writing about Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is a challenge, not least because of its stark minimalism. I can’t recall a concert film as ascetically…
Almost every program description or review of Alison O’Daniel’s first feature, The Tuba Thieves, including now this one, begins by noting that it is…
The Holocaust has been mined for kitschy platitudes for a long time now. It seems that artists, against their best instincts, just aren’t able…
The “social issue” film in contemporary Bollywood has as many forms of expression as it has sub-categories of issues. Take, for instance, the “women-centric”…
Dutch director Sacha Polak set a very high bar for herself with Hemel, her 2012 debut feature. Raw and at times agonizing, Hemel is…
In his critical study “Discourse and the Novel,” Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin described narrative fiction as a process by which individual characters are…
Writing on the difficulties of representing addiction, Leslie Jamison notes that the process of sobriety is seen as a “tedious addendum” to the riveting…
Kimi Takesue’s third feature film is a fraught, respectably reflexive process in objectification. Utilizing the much ado of the tourism industry as our subject…
Much like Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift — whose audaciously hypnotic visuals and elliptical narrative heralded a major directorial presence — Anthony Chen’s third…
With The Monk the Gun, director Pawo Choyning Dorji makes sure that viewers are fully aware of the film’s context by providing a barrage…
Although its title might suggest otherwise, the breakfast food most prominently employed as a metaphor in Scrambled, Leah McKendrick’s directorial debut, is not eggs,…
Vacation in Malia on the Greek island of Crete, a British tourist hub that might as well be hedonism incarnate, doesn’t end well for…
Disco Boy, the debut feature film from Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese, marks an interesting moment for arthouse cinema. Abbruzzese offers up an edgelord take…
Molly McGlynn’s sophomore feature, Fitting In explicitly reveals its core conceit from the very beginning, opening with two quotes on a symbolically pink-colored background: the…