Andreas Fontana’s 2021 film Azor told the story of Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship through the lens of a ground-level functionary, observing how unremarkable bankers and bureaucrats acted as intermediaries and allowed the wheels of oppression to churn on. Set in 1976, Sergio Castro San Martin’s The Chilean attempts…
Georgian filmmaker Uta Beria’s Tear Gas opens on a series of still images depicting people in migration, which eventually bleeds into the moving image as forest mist double-exposes itself over the final still. This notion of slow, of quiet, of creeping motion, is evocative of what follows, as…
Sometimes you just need to get a little stupid with it. That’s not an insult; it’s a label writer/director Dylan Meyer wears proudly on her sleeve. With her directorial debut, The Wrong Girls, Meyer looks at the landscape of buddy comedies — specifically stoner buddy comedies — and…
A nasty, ruthlessly streamlined throwback to the sleepover staples of the Reagan administration, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street (unofficially) brings the curtain down on the summer of 2026 with a flourish. Like a feature-length episode of The Outer Limits by way of a pulpy beach…
It’s a fair response for one to give less importance to mainstream directors when they downplay their themes or politics in interviews, for if the stark responses by Hollywood directors in America and France are anything to go by (Ford is a notorious example), production economics and the…
The main narrative engine, if there’s any to speak of, in Serra’s only other documentary, Afternoons of Solitude, was about trapping its subject in three hermetically sealed spaces: the ring, the hotel, and the van. The conditions that the film triangulated denied the bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey almost…
Representation does not equal inclusion. With ostensibly good intentions and plenty of compassion, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s attempt at telling the story of refugee children in Europe, The Green Eyes, unintentionally spites its ostensible sensitivity through a fundamental mishandling of its subject matter. Trite and simplistic, and…
Something I learned over many years working in restaurants is that there are no cooks that work in them, no servers, no bartenders, no hosts or bussers or runners. There are only performance artists, actors, poets, ballerinas, rappers, filmmakers, and writers. They pay the bills with restaurant work,…
Troubled souls trapped: the parameters of a typical Claire Denis narrative are rarely complex. Beau Travail’s French Foreign Legion soldiers were confined to their base in Djibouti, High Life’s condemned criminals to their spacecraft, and The Fence’s action occurs almost entirely on a construction site, in an unspecified…
Kent Jones has long been one of cinema’s greatest thinkers, so to simply refer to him as a director seems a gross oversimplification for what has been a lifetime spent serving cinema. Jones’ contributions are innumerable — his given titles at varying points in his career have been:…
Many of us can agree that 2026 has been a dark year, and the sights ahead only look dimmer. War, starvation, deportation, rising cost of living, a strained job market, compromised journalism — these are all concerns affecting us one way or another, with little promise of much…
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 quaint and rustic settlement of Sangerhausen, in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt, might have been an incidental choice of setting, but much of Julian Radlmaier’s quietly revelatory Phantoms of July brims with the contours of serendipity. The filmmaker’s self-reflexive and deadpan tendencies have been realized to charming effect in his…
While Hostel (2005) and Hostel: Part II (2007) are the immediate poster children for Eli Roth’s work as a horror director, his debut Cabin Fever (2002) actually offered the template to which he would most consistently adhere. Silly, irreverent, gruesome, and mean-spirited in equal measure, with Cabin Fever…
Kasper Kalle’s No Rest for the Wicked is, on the face of it, dark and grim; apt, for a vampire horror with Gothic sensibilities. The film, written by Kalle, Rasmus Birch, and Heinreich Ulrichs, takes place on the Faroe Islands in the mid-1800s. A small community of primarily fishermen…
Descriptors like “off-kilter” evoke something crooked, unbalanced, slanted, strange. These words are all, more or less, synonymous with the original meaning of the term “queer.” In the films of Gregg Araki — New Queer Cinema classics like The Living End and the Teen Apocalypse trilogy, which sent up…
If you haven’t heard, Gen Z isn’t getting laid. Sex — who’s having it, and more importantly, who’s not — is paramount in Gregg Araki’s return to the big screen, marking an end to a 12-year stint of cinematic celibacy for the director. Araki emerged as a masthead…
Yashaddai Owens’ debut feature, Jimmy, though it follows James Baldwin at a pivotal moment in his life, cannot be accurately called a biopic. Rather, in its depiction of a young Baldwin (Benny O. Arthur) meandering around Paris, Owens’ film is more of a loosely narrative collage or a city…