Our third dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first, and here’s our second) includes more TIFF world premieres than any…
Depiction of extreme pain is not the most distressing thing about Finnish BDSM comedy Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. Frequent scenes of a dominatrix strangling…
With Resin, director Daniel Borgman explores the beauty and the terror of escaping a dysfunctional society and returning to something more simplistic. The film…
With the distinct air of an artist desperate to cobble together a personal story out of some old rusty parts, III is a film…
Elia Suleiman: actor, director, “citizen of the world.” It Must Be Heaven follows Suleiman as he journeys from his native Palestine to Paris, and then to…
Our second dispatch from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (here’s our first) includes several more competition titles from this year’s Cannes that we’ve…
Much like its titular character, Pablo Larain’s Ema is a bit of an enigma: a seemingly complex character study that offers little in the…
Nina Hoss is an absolute treasure, one of the great actresses of contemporary cinema; her collaborations with Christian Petzold produced some of the decade’s…
Our first dispatch from the 2019 Toronto Film Festival (which runs from Sept. 5 – 15) finds us finally catching up with a lot…
Dividing Stephen King’s sprawling novel of repressed childhood trauma and inter-dimensional evil clowns into two parts not only made it easier to streamline It’s…
The Satanists in Hail Satan? don’t actually worship the devil, but it’d be a lot cooler if they did. Instead of ritualistic blood sacrifices and black…
Set in the remote valley of Qadishi, in Northern Lebanon, Abbas Fahdel’s Yara is a limited, if verdant vision of quotidian life. Centered on…
Director William Friedkin is known as a ‘big’ personality, loud and aggressive and bellicose. He’s been called a bully more often than not (Nat…
If José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia (2007) were reconceived as a contemporary gay drama, its opening might look something like the…
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is a documentary with an almost confounding resolve to simply document. Given the subject matter…
There’s been an interesting spate of feminist, or at least female-led, westerns recently; there’s Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman, a dark film that suggests the…
It shouldn’t surprise that a documentary tackling China’s population-curbing one-child policy, effectuated in the late 1970s and lasting until 2015, provides innately dramatic material,…
A religious drama set among the Pentecostal snake handlers of Appalachia, there are any number of paths that Them That Follow could have taken…