Guy Maddin’s Careful is newly restored and once again bringing its unique, alpine, psycho-sexual mania to cinemagoers, who are perhaps a little better prepared for it than they were upon its initial release in 1992. The visionary Canadian director’s third feature film is an astounding work of playful…
Major credit is due to KVIFF for continuing to world-premiere some of the roughest documentaries from the Ukrainian frontline. Two years ago, the festival unveiled Real (2024), consisting of 90 minutes of GoPro footage Oleh Sentsov shot by accident, in a single unbroken take from inside a trench.…
Il Cinema Ritrovato, the annual cinephile pilgrimage in Bologna, has reached its 40th edition. As ever, it brings an ample assortment of newly restored films to thousands of spectators who convene from around the world to watch blazing masterpieces in the scorching heat. Ritualistic gatherings forge unwritten rules…
Xue Ma’s films are radically unique. There’s a strange romance, explicit and implicit, and a profane magic that permeates the Chinese ex-pat’s White River (2023), as well as her most recent film, Wilde’s Room (currently in post-production). While the themes, situations, and relationships the director explores are serious,…
In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels devoid of context for the viewer. Though seemingly calm and collected, Sano’s behaviour breaks with the social order. He asks the young boy about…
Argentinian filmmaker Lucio Castro likes it when you don’t quite know what you’re looking at. His first feature, End of the Century, was a time-travel story of sorts, a tale of fleeting and enduring romance that spanned decades, yet could plausibly have occurred over a weekend. The trick…
In 2017’s Summer 1993, director Carla Simón’s feature debut, a young girl is sent to live with her mother’s family in Barcelona after her mother’s death. The film is an autobiographical project from Simón, and received wide praise for its raw depiction of childhood trauma and Simón’s ability…
In a fictional New York City, a wolf stalks through the night. This isn’t a typical wolf. She’s not prowling for a kill. This wolf is a queer filmmaker writing her next film. Falling into trysts with a cow here, a sheep there. Best friends with a lizard.…
In his 1908 novel A Room with a View, British novelist E.M. Forster probes the conflict between middle-class manners and sensual passion; his alliances lay entirely with the latter. Forster’s protagonist, young Lucy Honeychurch, finds herself in a “muddle” between her engagement to the socially acceptable, but stiff…
Filmmaker Julian Schnabel returns to a familiar topic with his In the Hand of Dante… sort of. The painter-turned-acclaimed filmmaker has dedicated most of his career to dramatizing the personal demons and trials of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Reinaldo Arenas, and Vincent van Gogh — and depending on…
If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of experimentation and fable in Ben Rivers’ latest feature, Mare’s Nest. Divided into chapters with names like, “Anarchy,” “The Word For Snow,” “Moon Meets…
“All films are time travel films, and all films are ghost films,” said filmmaker Mark Jenkin at a post-screening Q&A for the New York Film Festival premiere of his new film, Rose of Nevada. This sentiment certainly applies to Jenkin’s films, preoccupied as they are with cycles that…
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…
With her first feature since 2019’s Black Christmas remake, Sophia Takal’s Act One returns to some of the same obsessions and fascinations as 2016’s Always Shine, her breakthrough second film that detailed the disintegrating relationship between two actresses. For Act One, Takal draws from some of her own adolescent experiences as a burgeoning…
In John Carney’s latest work of music-centric cinema, Paul Rudd is Rick Power, frontman for The Bride & Groove, a Dublin-based wedding band. They tear through covers of Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen, and — on occasion and to lesser effect — Power’s own ballads. Rudd’s performance as a…
The 10th Nitrate Picture Show, programmed by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is predicated on a technology both out-of-date and incendiary: the eponymous film stock, which was the most commonly used in film production until the early 1950s, is notoriously flammable. The Eastman Museum is…
Nestled in the rural midwestern town of Three Oaks, Michigan, the largest flag day parade in the nation is a surreal scene of unabashed Americana, radiating with irony, sincerity, and, most tangibly, the aesthetics of neoconservatism. Co-directors Melissa and Andrew Shea capture the event for their latest film,…
Several of Kalil Haddad’s films begin with a school picture. An adolescent boy poses for the camera, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, a wide smile revealing stubby new teeth. At face value, the school picture establishes normalcy — it’s a rite of passage and shared experience…
Before you lies a choice, a selection of fates. In one possibility, you are Tsarina of all the Russias, you are caparisoned in gemstones, wrapped up in gleaming silver, visited — nightly — by steaming Hussars, each of whom is more grizzled, noble, fragrant than the last, in…
Steven Spielberg’s latest venture into science fiction is also perhaps his most extensive venture into examining the properties and powers of the cross-cut. Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor play the protagonists of Disclosure Day, and a late-game revelation reveals that they were always bonded to one another in…
In his 2020 dark comedy Dinner in America, director Adam Carter Rehmeier captured the stifling stagnancy of life in suburban America and the simmering urge to break free, a sentiment that recurs in his latest, the crime thriller Carolina Caroline. For sheltered West Texas filling-station employee Caroline (Samara…