For better or worse, Brett Goldstein is always — or at least for the far foreseeable future — going to be associated with his Ted Lasso character, Roy Kent. As Kent, he was grumpy, hot-headed, and, while time ultimately demonstrated his softer side, an overall rough personality. At…

The Mastermind Of Kelly Reichardt’s many talents behind the camera, historically, she is not a filmmaker you would refer to as “a trickster” — there is little in the way of twist or misdirection in her work. She is, however, a deconstructionist of genre, frequently the Western, but…

In 1974, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (henceforth EAAJAF) followed in the footsteps of the Japanese Red Army by committing several terrorist acts in order to shake up a conformist Japanese society that refused to acknowledge, much less reckon with, the sins of its immediate past. Like…

It’s a shame I had to see Kent Jones’ Willem Dafoe vehicle, Late Fame, on the Upper West Side at NYFF in mid-September. It was in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong time of year. Late Fame descends from a proud tradition of lovely films by the likes of…

The story begins twice: once with newspaper headlines informing us that Antoine Monnier’s young Charles has died mysteriously, and then we go back to six months prior, with Charles discussing proper walking technique to avoid wear and tear on shoes. It’s arguably the pettiest example of Charles believing…

The biography of an artist is an artist’s nemesis. It aims a howitzer at artists and the body of their work. In its illuminating, explicatory nature, it renders legible what had seemed sui generis; in reams of helpful context, it forces its subject into a set of coordinates,…

There is a futility to championing ideas which, once derided, have now been vindicated by the zeitgeist, in the same way that the idea of seeking innermost truth against the illusory grain is easily written off as vain. Both definitions of vanity apply here: present order, if nothing…

Writer-director Carmen Emmi, inspired in part by a 2016 L.A. Times article detailing a sting operation by undercover police officers at a popular cruising site in Long Beach, made his debut feature Plainclothes with a specific question in mind: “what happens when you police your feelings?” Set in…

Sirāt “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The question is posed from one beleaguered raver to another, on a school bus somewhere on the south side of the Atlas Mountains, hopefully approaching Mauritania. Sirāt, Óliver Laxe’s latest, is effectively a road movie toward this…

Bouchra Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker living in New York, and her mother Aicha, a painter who lives in Casablanca. Some time in the past, Bouchra had sent…

Unlike the two other entries in Dag Johan Haugerud’s thematically linked Love-Sex-Dreams trilogy, Dreams is not concerned with steadily paced dialogues or mature perspectives. While the fact it won the Golden Bear, awarded by a jury headed by Todd Haynes, might suggest some kind of new queer cinema…

It’s been a while since the world has been treated to a new Hal Hartley film. The writer/director’s career, which kicked off with 1989’s The Unbelievable Truth, never quite rose to the level of acclaim that was reached by contemporaries like Richard Linklater or Paul Thomas Anderson, but…

The History of Sound, from director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck, was met with a somewhat chilly critical reception at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Much-anticipated due to its buzzy stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, the film’s deliberate pacing and carefully calibrated restraint frustrated some critics.…

Sermon to the Void Amid a churning torrent of acid gold, Hilal Baydarov’s Sermon to the Void unveils its true form, slipping away from its preambulatory parable into something wholly incantatory. This displacement arrives unhurriedly; in fact, so gradual is its presence, and so glacial are its frames,…

As the Western world’s exemplar of an exotic and fantastical Orient, the city of Bangkok has fashioned itself into a locale of permissivity where sin and indulgence are self-consciously flaunted. To Western eyes, they bespeak the privilege of skin and socio-economic status; for locals, the farang types —…

Traditionally, dramas dealing with characters moving on from relationships follow a three-part structure: the chronicling of the youthful highs of the first passionate relationship and circumstances leading to its dissolution; the devastating aftershocks of that dissolution (with the former either being deployed linearly or emerging as a flashback…

If it ever gets proper distribution, Zoe Eisenberg’s new romantic drama Chaperone will surely generate several cycles of enervating discourse on Twitter; it’s rare that a film highlights a complicated character like Misha (Mitzi Akaha) without judgment or audience hand-holding. A realistic portrait of aging millennial ennui, Misha…

The Currents A woman, beautiful and a touch removed, travels to Switzerland from Argentina to accept an award. She throws the glass statuette in the bathroom trash, then leaves the ceremony to wander the streets. Clad in a vivid blue coat, she stands out from the grey cobblestone…

Wavelengths 2: Into the Blue, more than either of the other 2025 shorts programs or the features, exemplifies experimental film programming’s recent trend toward documentary, essay, and other “non-fiction” forms. All of the films in this program explore, in some fashion, the moving image as archive, memory, or…

Mile End Kicks Having decided myself to migrate from a Toronto suburb to Montreal in my young adulthood shortly after hearing Visions for the first time, I am perhaps a few inches short of the requisite “critical distance” to pen a sober review of Chandler Levack’s Mile End…

Siyou Tan’s debut feature, Amoeba, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival under its Discovery section, introducing a fresh and candid new voice in Singaporean cinema. Billed as a coming-of-age film, Amoeba raises a defiant finger to the institutions and ideologies of control that have, since time immemorial,…