The fall film festival season is already in full swing, but the Toronto International Film Festival stands out due to its emphasis on commercialism, and…
If there’s one thing The Future Perfect has going for it—perhaps more so than any other film playing ND/NF this year—it’s how its premise builds out of its…
It’s difficult to argue that Darren Aronofsky’s films are poorly executed, at least on a formal level; his largely allegorical works are often manic,…
Exciting, fascinating and mostly well-rounded, Peter Nicks’s The Force follows the Oakland Police Department (and by proxy, the citizens and city of Oakland) for…
Theo Anthony’s Rat Film, which first premiered at Locarno in August, wastes no time in grabbing your attention, opening with voiceover about the beginning…
Beautiful Things deals with some explicitly not beautiful things: oil drilling, cargo hauling, self-described “torture” (scientific experimentation), and trash burning. All these odd occupations are tied together…
We have a lot planned for the fall film festival season—including multiple dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. But…
Almost entirely without verbal exposition, Yuri Ancarani’s hypnotic, purely observational The Challenge spends 70 minutes hovering around a falconer’s auction/competition in Qatar. Offering the barest of…
Sometimes all it takes to set a film apart is a distinctive milieu. In Deepak Rauniyar’s White Sun, the setting is a remote village in…
Though Romanian director Cristi Puiu sets his latest film, Sieranevada, at a family gathering commemorating the death of a late patriarch, the filmmaker has much…
The Villainess, Jung Byung-Gil’s demented take on La Femme Nikita,—or, alternately, any number of female-driven Hong Kong action flicks—has a number of eye-popping set-pieces…
Eliza Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love, was a promising, if familiar Brooklyn-set tale of a teenage girl’s burgeoning sexuality. With, Beach Rats,…
Critics out of Cannes labeled Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Unknown Girl “a lesser work.” If that’s the case, it just proves that the brothers…
Sometime in the near future, Tess (Geena Davis) and her husband Jon (Tim Robbins) gift octogenarian widow Marjorie (Lois Smith) an A.I. hologram version…
John Trengove’s The Wound is a thematically blunt but visually dynamic film, one built around intimate, observational camerawork and an integrity of character development. Impressively choreographing a…
Sunao Katabuchi’s In This Corner of the World—adapted from the 2007 manga of the same name—provides the perspective of a WWII Japanese housewife enduring…
Bertrand Bonello’s controversial new feature Nocturama, which was passed over by both the Cannes and Venice film festivals, has been pigeonholed as a film that…
Deviating from protocol a bit with our timing (we swear we know when the halfway point of the year is), the following list is nonetheless…