The Holocaust has provided the backdrop for so many films that it’s a rather bracing experience to discover one that handles the subject and setting…
A breathless, even primal, survival thriller, Haider Rashid’s Europa works like gangbusters as a propulsive bit of genre filmmaking, but less so as the empathetic…
“Misfortune departs, grace comes in,” says a villager, as she takes a knife to a Kaffan-leaden woman’s hand. In brightly-lit, glossy handheld, Agata (Celeste Cescutti)…
Moneyboys A tacked-on melancholy shoulders, for the most part, the dramatic weight present in C.B. Yi’s carefully composed and frequently arresting first feature. Moneyboys, as…
Pig isn’t the Nic Cage film you’re expecting — it’s better. It’s tough to recall a recent film — particularly outside the auteur context — that…
Her Socialist Smile is yet another landmark work from Gianvito, more intimate than his usual but no less fiercely and formally intelligent. John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail…
The titular fracture, between Marina Foïs and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s lesbian couple Julie and Raf, is one of three divides uniting La Fracture’s anxious reality. Physically,…
Jean-Gabriel Périot’s films center around archival footage, crafting stories from multimedia video and grafting them in and out of multiple contexts. Best known for the…
Bergman Island Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally, an insular film. Set almost entirely on the island of Fårö, where the legendary Swedish filmmaker…
Roadrunner doesn’t revolutionize the portrait documentary, but it does execute its essential elements with pathos and formal precision. The late culinary connoisseur Anthony Bourdain once…
George Romero’s two 1978 releases, Dawn of the Dead and Martin, represent the director at the apex of his career as an artist who had…
In La Civil’s final shot, Cielo (Arcelia Ramírez) sits on a bench outside her home in Mexico. At the end of a long, fruitless journey…
One of two films debuting in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight by actresses thrust into the spotlight thanks to Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady…
The forest greens and crumbling modernist estates of the Eastern French town of Forbach provide the backdrop for Softie (Petite Nature), a queer coming-of-age story…
Cow Depending on your perspective — and depending on the film — Andrea Arnold’s cinema vacillates between kitsch and kitchen sink, her intended brand of…
The Halt is another epic and epically long Lav Diaz effort, one that might be his most accessible work yet. When dealing with Lav Diaz,…
Though the films of John Cassavetes are often erroneously described as “improvised” or “verite,” claims that belie Cassavetes’s formal fidelity, it was a modernist, Virginia…
Like Blindspotting before it, Summertime is glib in its politics and hollow in its messaging. In one of the more telling recent Hollywood career leaps, L.A.-based music video director…
Fear Street Part 2 improves on Part 1 in nearly every way, a slick slasher of high energy, genre play, and legitimate pathos. The second film in…
The Woman Who Ran continues Hong’s run of affecting personal exorcisms, here crafting a memorable protagonist who is equally mysterious and familiar. Hong Sang-soo’s excoriating relationship…