Over a small jetty, a cruise ship waits to dock and its passengers get ready to dismount. The process is unrushed, methodical; a throng of walkers, with the odd motorcyclist interspersed among them, head onto land while, from the other end, several people await their turn to board…
The international breakthrough of All We Imagine as Light in 2024, which was the first Indian film to play in Cannes competition in 30 years, could be taken as a sign of life for, or at least an indicator of, renewed Western attention toward a resurgent parallel cinema…
Ben Wheatley has done it all. From humble beginnings with killer indies like Down Terrace and Kill List to Hollywood mega-productions like Rebecca and The Meg 2, there’s almost no stone left unturned for the British filmmaker. Having even dipped into trippy horror surrealism with A Field in…
After it was reported that MUBI had received a $100 million investment from venture capitalists with ties to an Israeli defense tech firm in May 2025, The Los Angeles Festival of Movies found itself thrown into a tailspin. But by last September they announced the end of their…
In my day job as a college writing instructor, there is a lot of talk about “multi-modal composition.” This simply means that instead of remaining strictly within the bounds of the written argumentative essay, students are often encouraged to employ digital media to produce audiovisual argumentation. This can…
Excepting the newly bicurious and the chronically polyamorous, most people will adore Erupcja for the wrong reasons. Pete Ohs’ sixth narrative feature has, on the surface, all the ingredients ripe for distilling the contemporary formula for earth-shaking passion. It stars Charli XCX, centers those of a sapphic persuasion,…
Much digital ink has been spilled over whether now, more than ever, we need positive queer images in popular media. As the world skids further and further into the dank crevices of reactionary culture, quaint affirmations like Heated Rivalry and Heartstoppers seem increasingly like liberal fantasies meant to…
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 Kicks. My notes…
In the new Apple TV original film Outcome, Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a hugely successful actor emerging from a five-year hiatus that found him disappearing from the spotlight to “find himself,” which is code for kicking a nasty heroin habit he hid from the public. Now…
Few people are immune to the power of a tale thrillingly told. So says Buffalo Bill Cody, narrator of Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppi’s latest film, Heads or Tails? What we’re about to see should be “quite the story”; at stake is no less than the…
The most frustrating thing about Igor Bezinović’s Fiume o Morte! is how quickly the novelty of re-creation wears off. The sight of three soldiers staring into the camera and jostling with each other for dominance within the frame is followed, seconds later, by its archival mirror: three other…
While easy to forget given its catastrophic success, fascism came into the world a mess. The writer and public intellectual Umberto Eco wrote in a 1995 essay that the ideology’s original Italian form, under which he spent much of his childhood, had “no special philosophy.” This, Eco contests…
Chaos reigns in Yasuhiro Aoki’s anarchic, wildly imaginative feature directorial debut ChaO, a whirlwind exploration of the breadth of storytelling potential in animated film. Almost assaultively vibrant in its bright colors, fast pace, fantastical elements, and bold disregard for conventional narrative style and structure, it’s a somewhat disorienting…
In the last decade or two, it often feels like action comedy speaks one language. You can blame Ryan Reynolds if you’d like, or maybe it goes further back to Joss Whedon. Whoever you want to throw the book at, it hardly matters. The point is that we’ve…
A man emerges from the forest, destitute. We follow him as he shambles through the streets, parks, hills, and graveyards of Cluj-Napoca. It’s his last day on earth. When Ion (Gabriel Spahiu) wakes up the next morning in his makeshift home — the boiler room of a building…
In just a few short years, it’s been a thrill to watch Alice Maio Mackay’s ascension. From her debut feature, So Vam, to Carnage For Christmas, Mackay has created an entire ecosystem to herself. Her dreamy, hypnotic visions of a world where trans and queer love can thrive…
As of this writing, filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay turned 21 less than a week ago. She has also just premiered her sixth feature length film in the last four years, a remarkably sustained run of productivity, regardless of age. Unbeholden to studios and working with micro-budgets, Mackay does…
Marc Jacobs is everywhere. In Marc by Sofia — the Sofia of the title being Coppola — the Lost in Translation director makes a case for her longtime friend and collaborator as a monolith of American ubiquity. His designs channel Old Hollywood and straddle the forefront of international…
Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid isn’t shy about his disgust toward his home country. A body of work examining Israel with a sense of frustration and sadness, Lapid is one of the few artists from the Zionist nation willing to unspool the darkness at its center. With his latest,…
An 11-minute standing ovation at Cannes can’t be called a total disaster. Nevertheless, Alpha arrived at the 2025 London Film Festival trailing a, shall we say, less-than-enthusiastic critical response. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Palme d’Or winner Titane is a film swollen with ideas, ambitious to the point of…