God knows it’s hard to get noticed in the indie film scene these days, which is why Jon Bass’ new experiment in self-releasing warrants some attention. Bass, a “Hey, I recognize that guy” character actor who has appeared on TV, movies, and Broadway, has begun releasing his new…
Written and directed by Erblin Nushi, I Love You More is a delicate film which explores the heartbreak of queer adolescence. The film centers on a young Kosovar teenager, Ben (Don Shala), who is trying to keep his relationship with his online boyfriend, Leo (Leonik Sahiti), a secret…
Stan Brakhage’s 1958 film Anticipation of the Night could perhaps be likened to the late-19th and early-20th century tonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg. In works such as Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Pelleas und Melisande (1903), the composer had not yet broken with the tradition of Western tonality, and…
That hunk in the romance novel you’re reading — what if he was real and ready to mingle? That’s the entertaining and confident premise of Ashes, the newest film from experienced Turkish director Erdem Tepegöz. A pretty, married woman reads a smutty book and scopes out the patisserie…
The familiar quietude of vacant alleys, secret crooks, and empty restaurants; those shared moments of unspoken reminiscence and silenced discovery. With Here, Bas Devos trains his patient gaze on the ambiguity of attraction, whether for another person or for the microscopic environments flourishing under the scrutiny of moss.…
Steppenwolf Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has directed 15 films in the last 12 years, a breakneck pace to rival even Hong Sang-soo. Not many seem to have received any kind of US distribution; his most recent work to be properly released was 2020’s Yellow Cat, a charming if…
Gábor Reisz’s latest film is Hungarian through and through, but despite that, it feels very much like a sanded-down Romanian one. In fact, some of the underlying themes in Explanation for Everything have been addressed with much more subtlety in Cristian Mungiu’s recent films, such as R.M.N. and…
Dear Kaita Ablaze France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary energy into his Les Chants du Maldoror, a prose poem featuring a man so evil and ugly that he denies…
The interaction between documenting the act of filmmaking and the final film as a meaning-making document for the filmmaker, subject, and spectator is a staple of postmodern Iranian cinema. Abbas Kiarostami experimented with it first in Close-Up (1990) and then in Through the Olive Trees (1994); Jafar Panahi,…
France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary energy into his Les Chants du Maldoror, a prose poem featuring a man so evil and ugly that he denies killing himself such…
The subject of the poets and poetry of Hong Kong is a natural for Ann Hui, always the most literarily inclined of the great directors of her generation, the Hong Kong New Wave. Before studying film in London, she earned a master’s degree in English and Comparative Literature…
Although its title might suggest otherwise, the breakfast food most prominently employed as a metaphor in Scrambled, Leah McKendrick’s directorial debut, is not eggs, but rather the aptly millennial avocado. Overripe avocados, condemned to their state of wrinkled, discolored decay, serve as an unsubtle manifestation of aimless 34-year-old…
Following quickly after the opening credits to She is Conann — a rapid montage of freakish landscapes played to a hypnotic classical piece — director Bertrand Mandico throws us into a beguiling opening sequence that immediately situates viewers in a strange world. An elderly woman, cloaked in a…
Director and co-writer Alex Schaad has made a bold gamble with his new film Skin Deep, taking what is essentially an ‘80s-style body-swap premise and crafting it into a subdued, even solemn art film about depression, relationships, and sexuality. It gives life to the old cliché about loving…
Head South For as long as the cinematic form has existed, it has embraced nostalgia, that cultural drug which oversees virtually every socio-political framework known to modern man. From D.W. Griffith and the reimagining of an idyllic Confederacy in The Birth of a Nation, to Nazi glorification under…
The recent construction of the $217 million Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, confirmed by Hindu mythology as Shri Ram’s birthplace in India, and the ruling right-wing party’s wide publicization of its consecration ceremony has, amongst many other things, perpetuated a fixed definition of religious devotion. It’s an outwardly expressed…
The virtues of Danish director Nikolaj Arcel’s new feature, The Promised Land, are those of old-school Hollywood studio pictures. The film is scrupulously well-constructed in the narrative sense — its main characters and conflicts are cleanly established within the first 10 minutes. It moves along at a steady…
Citizen Weiner What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection for the dopamine high of instant, ephemeral virality which, once achieved, only begets more rushes, more clicks, more highs. If such is…
Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam’s debut feature, Mambar Pierrette, opens with the mundane rhythms of domestic work. Mambar (Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat), a seamstress in the city of Douala in Cameroon, prepares lunch for her ailing mother and three children. She then wakes her mother, applies ointment on her feet,…
Where have all the taboo romances gone? Admittedly, the trailer for Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl didn’t inspire much hope for their return, particularly since the Martin Freeman–Jenna Ortega pairing doesn’t exactly scream “steamy” — it doesn’t scream much of anything, really. Still, the possibility of some melodramatic,…