Guatemala on-screen is underrepresented, fertile territory. Mad Mel’s Apocalypto is likely the region’s highest profile depiction, or you could look toward El Norte from Gregory…
Argentinean director Benjamín Naishtat garnered notice about 15 years ago, primarily with a trio of innovative, highly unusual feature films. 2014’s History of Fear was a nearly abstract nocturne focused on the various ways that a society can break down, turning its participants against one another. On a meta-level, it was about the different ways
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As the popular online adage goes, Cinephilia is a disease, and few exemplify this better than filmmakers themselves. Shaped by the forms, narratives and dramaturgies that constituted their cinematic initiation, filmmakers often find it difficult to go beyond these formative (pun intended) experiences, trapped seemingly forever by their anxieties of influence, to borrow the title
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There is a striking early scene with an unknown woman that cuts deep into the sensory motif embedded in the title of May el-Toukhy’s latest…
War is hard to steer away from in the 2026 Venice Film Festival program, where films from Iran (A Bit of Light), Palestine (Citizen Osama),…
In 2025, among the best films of the year, at least according to this very outlet, was Lav Diaz’s Magellan. That work concluded along the…
NAZA is a film so powerful and so utterly terrifying that it should be watched by everyone. And still, it would feel wrong to slot…
The way in which we tell the origin story of a romantic relationship says a lot about how we look at our partners in the…
A Paul Greengrass movie is a lot like finding yourself stuck next to a talkative history professor on a plane. Well-meaning, passionate, and rambling, you…
We, in the modern world, are more connected to one another than ever before, and increasingly so. But are we also lonelier than ever? In…
Hope, South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s first foray into big-budget science fiction, is still very much a Na film. The hapless main characters, the thrilling,…
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…
Only the teeming right-wing critics of mid-20th century Cahiers du Cinéma could have so fervently opposed the notion of political didacticism in film. Needless to…
What is “Buzz”? The murmur around a popular film at Sundance? The alarm from an angry bee, fly, gnat? The sultry purr of a sex…
Hope, director Na Hong-jin’s first feature in a decade, is also his splashiest film. It first premiered in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes,…
Only his second feature-length film after maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (2021), Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People is the director’s least tangibly experimental project to…
Bernardo Bertolucci passed away in 2018, but his unfinished film is still echoing. Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber unfurls from the final screenplay Bertolucci conceived,…
In Haitian Vodou, “turning someone into a zombie is like putting them back into slavery… forever.” This is among the opening lines of Maya Annik…
“Talk to me in a Continental accent.” That’s what Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel), a Mexican corporate heiress, begs of her Cuban immigrant husband Camilo (Gael García…
Guy Moshe is an Israeli-American filmmaker. This, under normal circumstances, is not information pertinent to a review, but regarding his latest, The Fix, it’s tough…
Hungarian writer-director Gábor Reisz garnered significant notice on the festival circuit for his third feature film, 2023’s Explanation for Everything. That film was a pointed…