In his first feature Conference of the Birds, director Amin Motallebzadeh borrows a title from a revered source: 12th-century Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar’s allegorical…
Julian of Norwich was a religious mystic and anchoress in the Middle Ages. After a grave illness during which she experienced visions of Christ on…
Anyone who has made as many masterpieces as the French experimental director Jean-Claude Rousseau deserves his occasional oddities and indulgences, but his new 10-minute short…
When Smoke Signals arrived in U.S. theaters on the eve of Independence Day, 1998, few could anticipate the wave of Native American art that would…
It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for…
Serpent’s Path Kiyoshi Kurosawa is our great purveyor of modern ennui, a chronicler of creeping existential dread as the world we have created now threatens…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is our great purveyor of modern ennui, a chronicler of creeping existential dread as the world we have created now threatens to engulf…
Chop wood, carry water. The well is running dry for the titular noise punk band of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz. Their shows in their hometown…
In Japan, the term jidaigeki — literally translating to “period drama” — is typically ascribed to a genre of samurai film, most commonly set during…
Daihachi Yoshida’s black-and-white character study Teki Cometh follows the daily routines and ruminations of retired French literature professor Gisuke Watanabe (Kyôzô Nagatsuka). Divided into four…
The death of a loved one is fundamental to the human condition, with the ensuing grief making way for an odyssey of pain and acceptance.…
Imbued with plenty of allure and the potential for surprise, friendly get-togethers and familial gatherings in cinema sustain such an appeal that they never outright…
“Democracy dies in darkness,” the slogan of The Washington Post, couldn’t be further removed from the salvational rhetoric witnessed in Brazil with the rise of…
In his debut narrative feature, To a Land Unknown, Danish-Palestinian director and documentarian Mahdi Fleifel takes inspiration from New Hollywood films centering men on the…
Girls is Lena Dunham’s magnum opus. The irony is that she wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the HBO classic at the ripe age of…
One of the most interesting things that writer/director Christian Swegal does in his new film Sovereign is forgoing any introductory text scrawl or blatant exposition…
30 minutes into Jem Cohen’s new film Little, Big, and Far, the viewer watches a mostly vacant mall parking lot slowly descend into darkness. For…
Cynical perhaps, but it feels safe to assume in 2025 that a majority of Americans do not know that Rhodesia was a country, let alone…
Come a little closer and see — you need to inhale. No contemporary filmmaker understands California quite like Paul Thomas Anderson, who throughout his rightfully…
There are two popular theories about the etymology of Prvić, a Croatian island in the Šibenik archipelago. The first theory relates to its closest proximity…