Sci-fi-tinged two-hander Biosphere is the latest offering from Mr. Mumblecore himself, Mark Duplass, who not only stars, but also co-wrote the script with director Mel…
It’s a shame that our contemporary film exhibition apparatus has no place for medium-length works like Alain Kassanda’s Trouble Sleep. At 40 minutes, it’s too…
Hollywood action films have long abdicated the realm of gritty believability in favor of awe-inspiring excitement beyond the border of suspended belief. This has been…
Director Carolina Cavalli’s Italian import Amanda opens with the titular twenty-something protagonist attending a film screening alone on a Saturday night. Standing outside of the…
In many respects, Basma Al-Sharif’s 2017 feature Ouroboros was a broad summary of the themes she had explored in her experimental shorts over the previous…
Fadhel Messaoudi (played by himself) is in a fatal car crash. His soul ascends to a purgatorial stasis, imagined via the images of interrogation from…
The familiar chime of a Skype tone soundtracks a procession of festival laurels and production logos. Then, the sound swiftly vanishes, replaced by silence over…
Hamburg-based, multi-disciplinary artist Martha Mechow makes her feature film directorial debut with Losing Faith, an ecstatic portrait of womanhood breaking free from societal norms of…
If language is something you acquire — as a child, learning the “meaning” of words and how they fit and flow together — then it…
For the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the world comprised a single substance, and that substance was God. “Except God,” he wrote in the treatise Ethics,…
In Miranda Pennell’s latest essay film, the filmmaker carefully plaits a number of seemingly distinct cultural and historical strands, and in so doing, offers a…
In Michael Salerno’s The Masturbator’s Heart, death is an unshakeable temptation so vivid it becomes an obligation. It’s a remedy, a return to total neutrality.…
“The homosexual subject group,” writes Guy Hocquenghem, “knows that civilization alone is mortal.” Written in 1973, prior to the AIDS epidemic, Hocquenghem located the threat…
It might seem trite to begin a film review with a quote, but we live in a world of clichés and can only outrun our…
We’re in the midst of an unexpected run of films about the experiences of Asian-born women confronting the lives they left behind as children, struggling…
As far as film titles go, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken has to be one of the worst to swing out of Hollywood in many a…
Killing, at first glance, can seem something of a left-field move for cult director Shinya Tsukamoto; it’s a slow-paced period piece that expends nearly an…
Twenty years after its release, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has an enduring cultural foothold that few actually good films can match. Of those released in…
Anime has always been more inclined toward YA-facing and -reflecting projects than most other film genres, perhaps only rivaled by the short-lived post-Harry Potter cottage…
The burgeoning demand for cinematic “relevance” today comes with several implicit assumptions as to what that relevance entails. For starters, there’s a certain complementary relationship…