With Passages, American indie filmmaker Ira Sachs builds on the not-unexpected Euro-arthouse move he made with 2019’s underwhelming Cannes competition swing Frankie, which threw a…
Premiering in the Berlinale’s Forum section, Claire Simon’s documentary Our Body follows her 2021 docudrama I Want to Talk About Duras. The title of that…
Across diverse forms of media, artists have devised various modes of depicting oppression. Watching Clement Virgo’s stirring feature Brother, it’s the smallness of the characters…
The latest in Anno Hideaki’s reimagining of classic Japanese tokusatsu stories, following Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and — depending on how you look at it…
Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s terrific new documentary, Satan Wants You, focuses primarily on Michelle Remembers (1980), a nominally “nonfiction” book co-written by Michelle…
Cannily scheduled to be released only a few weeks after Oppenheimer, documentarian Steve James’ (Hoop Dreams) A Compassionate Spy positions itself as a fitting companion…
Released back in 2015, filmmaker Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy was a bisected biopic of the brilliant but tormented musician Brian Wilson, whose preternatural gifts…
The career of Romanian director Paul Negoescu has not been easy to pin down. His debut feature, A Month in Thailand (2012), was a remarkable,…
A decade ago, a baffling headline made waves throughout social media and film forums: director Steven Soderbergh, relatively young, announced his retirement. It was difficult…
Sympathy for the Devil rehearses a familiar thriller conceit that is unsurprising from the outset. It opens with the affable everyman protagonist, the Driver (Joel…
Clocking in at a breezy 73 minutes, Kokomo City — which bagged audience awards at both the Sundance and Berlin film festivals — proves a…
Writer-director-indie provocateur Neil LaBute strikes again with Fear the Night, the filmmaker’s third feature in less than 12 months. This sudden ubiquity is either a…
Non-fiction scenarios and non-professional actors are often characterized as so rich and unpredictable that all a director needs to be is a receiver for what…
The past decade suggests an encroaching — or, perhaps at this point, arrived — renaissance in Indigenous art. Regardless of the medium, native voices are…
When talking about Mouchette, his acclaimed 1967 drama, Robert Bresson said that the put-upon titular character “offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found…
It’s quaint to look back on it now, but there was a time when making a film based on an amusement park ride was met…
It’s not quite accurate to describe Darkness as magic realism, but it’s not strictly a genre piece, either. Much like the children at the story’s…
Metanarratives have long-embodied the postmodern sensibility of ironic detachment by creating cultural products that are both self-acknowledging and effacing. They explore the very idea of…
Having already mined Transformers, Tetris, and, of course, Barbie, for their cinematic potential, it was only a matter of time before another nostalgic toy company…
Like his (still-undistributed, in North America) previous film, 2017’s Walking Past the Future, Li Ruijun’s latest, Return to Dust (an official selection of this year’s…
From the outset, writer-director Laurence Vannicelli’s Mother, May I? appears to contain little in the way of originality, a two-character chamber drama that is also…