Much has changed in the world over the past 10 years. A worsening environmental crisis has decimated the way of life for millions of people.…
In 2001, Jia Zhangke made Unknown Pleasures, in which Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao Qiao who tries to make a living as a…
“The world’s most important and influential band breaks up and it’s not a big deal.” Thus begins Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements, establishing from the jump…
There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined oppressive…
If you know anything at all about French director François Ozon, then you realize just how little we know about him. Sure, we have all…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve…
The opening shot ofTrương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam depicts two men in enveloping darkness. One carries the other on his back as he trudges…
Like his 2012 masterpiece Tabu, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour uses the transition from the silent to the sound era to explore the passage into a…
Despite many noble dead on the field, the battle to prohibit video games from the hall of art has long since failed. The temple is…
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia begins, as so many stories do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, 30-something Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is driving to his rural hometown…
Set in the year 2019, An Unfinished Film is a fictional documentary about a film crew that reunites to finish a queer feature from 10…
Empires, as a rule, do not exist in the plural, for each empire conceives of itself as sovereign and total. In practice, this solipsism has…
Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure in Isabella; Love’s Labour’s…
“This must be my punishment,” narrates Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), as he recalls the frog he tortured in a grade school science class. Mickey is…
The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended experiments…
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, after premiering at last year’s Venice Film Festival and winning the festival’s prize for Best Screenplay, amassed an unforeseen level…
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic in…
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language films have operated in a particularly confessional mode. Featuring The Room Next Door’s co-star Tilda Swinton, his 2020 short film…
The linchpin scene of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist arrives nearly an hour into its 215-minute runtime when Adrien Brody’s Hungarian architect, László Tóth, sits down…
In Werner Herzog’s latest, Theater of Thought, the director largely known in his documentary work for discursive flights of wonderful pontification takes an American road…