In modernist art cinema, there has been a minor tradition of self-portrait films, and naturally they have been as different from one another as their…
2023 will surely go down in history as the year Ogawa An owned the international festival circuit. Okay, maybe not really, but Following the Sound…
There are a few different films all struggling for screen time in Noah Collier & Emily MacKenzie’s new documentary Carpet Cowboys, including a treatise on…
Like a political cartoon stretched out to feature length and shot like a German Expressionist film, Pablo Larraín’s El Conde possesses one of the year’s…
Though they lived a millennium and a half apart, Aristotle and Dante Alighieri shared a conception of love that gave rise to most of humanity’s…
An indie horror film about a young woman trying to keep her inner beast at bay, it’s a testament to Jacqueline Castel’s My Animal that…
Youssef Chebbi’s horror-tinged police procedural Ashkal (being released in the States officially as Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation) begins with a brief explanation of The Gardens of Carthage,…
According to certain cinephilic thinking — specifically arguments that come from those who worship at the altars of Michael Mann and Tony Scott — director…
In a rather brazen move, the third title card in the end credits of new horror flick Don’t Look Away reads as a dedication to…
In Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray’s phantasmagorical 1954 Western, it takes fewer than two minutes for a deafening explosion of dynamite to ring out. The detonation…
Mother Lode straddles a few different lines in its depiction of the grueling lives of gold miners in the mountains of Peru. For all practical…
David Depesseville’s debut feature, Astrakan, is a film that is at once deeply humanist and utterly pitiless. Essentially a character study, the film depicts the…
Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil takes the broad, familiar strokes of the revenge drama and fashions them into something altogether more tragic. The film…
Jennifer Reeder’s new film Perpetrator has received some very strong reviews at Berlinale, and to be honest, it takes a while to figure out exactly…
Far too many movies demand far too little from viewers. Maybe they aren’t asking the right questions, or perhaps the questions themselves are just going…
The metatextual fortune cookie message (e.g. “Help! I’m being held hostage in a fortune cookie factory!”) is an obvious premise for a joke, indeed one…
At first glance, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence seems to exist in opposition to its creator’s body of work. Directed and co-written by Nagisa Ôshima, an…
In a recent think piece for Salon, critic Sam Adams asks “Where did all the hacks go?” He’s mainly talking about Disney’s penchant for foisting…
Ingenuous, low-budget sci-fi is having a moment. It’s been a long time since Primer and Upstream Color, or even Coherence or Timecrimes. But recent festival offerings like The Artifice Girl and Aporia suggest that…
Independent filmmaker Anna Biller (Viva, The Love Witch) recently stirred up a mini-tempest on the website formerly known as Twitter, calling out — sight unseen…