The Perfect Candidate keeps the stakes low and can be cloying at times, but its story is necessary. Haifaa Al-Mansour, whose 2012 feature debut Wadjda…
Heaven Reaches Down to Earth Tebogo Malebogo’s Heaven Reaches Down to Earth begins with red embers dancing. Their subtle flickers, alongside the pulsing buzz of…
The French New Wave has long been the go-to introductory movement for burgeoning cinephiles. Unlike other, more loosely-defined national “waves,” it has reasonably delineated boundaries,…
The Boy from Medellín’s early commitment to emotional and psychological honesty is ultimately subsumed by the doc’s refusal to engage on any political level. With…
Spiritual faith, by virtue of its abstract and elusive qualities, rarely translates well to the visual medium, if indeed it can be translated at all.…
Firouzeh Khosrovani’s documentary Radiograph of a Family opens with an image that is both hook and omen: her mother’s wedding in Tehran, as she is…
Pablo Escoto’s All the Light We Can See comes with a bibliography in its end credits, a kind of road map to its poetically cryptic…
Coming from the world of short fiction, Juja Dobrachkous made her debut as a feature film director with Bebia, à mon seul désir at the…
Kim Mi-jo’s debut feature, the stark social-realist drama Gull, may be a slight 75 minutes in length, but it packs quite a powerful punch across…
Dark Red Forest Spiritual faith, by virtue of its abstract and elusive qualities, rarely translates well to the visual medium, if indeed it can be…
Although The Flowers of St. Francis sits comfortably within one Roberto Rossellini’s most lauded creative stretches , it’s a work that still doesn’t exactly have…
Wrath of Man is a hybrid heist/revenge film that is pure fluff and littered with Ritchie idiosyncrasies, but also truly technically impressive. Posited: Guy Ritchie…
Here Today is a baffling, schmaltzy oddball of a film that finds Billy Crystal profoundly out of touch. There’s been something of a recent resurgence when…
The Paper Tigers doesn’t pull it all together dramatically or narratively, but its genre reverence is a steadying force. Reverence looms large in Quoc Bao Tran’s…
Cliff Walkers is a visually slick and violent spy flick that avoids propaganda and imbues its proceedings with considerable emotional and existential weight. Don’t let a…
Monster is a messy, crude, and politically flaccid throwaway flick that probably should have just stayed on the shelf. Premiering at Sundance in 2018 to no…
The Water Man is a slight film that gets bogged down under the weight of its heavy themes and nondescript myth-making. Let’s just be blunt…
Fried Barry’s shock tactics wear thin after a while and its stylistic cribbing leaves much to be desired, but it possesses enough ferocity and ambition…
Much like the man at its center, State Funeral is an inscrutable, complex work. Josef Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, at his Kuntsevo dacha,…
Iva Radivojević’s Aleph builds itself atop Jorge Luis Borges’ short story of the same name, rendering a small tale of infinity-seeking, a philosophical riff on…