After arguably seeing his fame peak in the early days of Covid — on the back of starring turns in Big Time Adolescence and The…
You might not assume it, but the handsome, boyish, 19-year-old Leonardo (Manfredi Marini) at the center of Giovanni Tortorici’s refreshingly pulse-tapping debut, Diciannove, doesn’t feel…
Sometimes, all it takes is a platform. The rubble of an abandoned village can be a platform for a flag, the flag a symbol of…
What remains of the video store today is a boutique novelty. Unless you happen to live in a neighborhood hip enough to indulge in cinephilic…
Back in the winter, the film Companion used the premise of a young “couple” taking their first trip together to a secluded house in the countryside as…
Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her approach…
Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed…
Nothing elicits an emotional response quite like a shock. Things hit harder when you haven’t had time to prepare for them — the funniest jokes,…
What can we understand as agency, for individuals placed into contexts that are fabricated in dehumanizing forms? How does the capacity for someone to willfully…
A goat gives birth; a paraplegic man’s soul leaves his body. In between, life and the flesh are one. Such appears to be the order…
The exorcism and possession subgenre has been at a creative stall basically since its heyday in the 1970s. The panoply of genre tropes looks more…
Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s fascination…
When the world turned to shit approximately five years ago, satire marched ahead, determined to outpace the banality of lived reality. Old-school broadcasts and appeals…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies…
When Smoke Signals arrived in U.S. theaters on the eve of Independence Day, 1998, few could anticipate the wave of Native American art that would…
It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for…
The death of a loved one is fundamental to the human condition, with the ensuing grief making way for an odyssey of pain and acceptance.…
Imbued with plenty of allure and the potential for surprise, friendly get-togethers and familial gatherings in cinema sustain such an appeal that they never outright…
“Democracy dies in darkness,” the slogan of The Washington Post, couldn’t be further removed from the salvational rhetoric witnessed in Brazil with the rise of…
In his debut narrative feature, To a Land Unknown, Danish-Palestinian director and documentarian Mahdi Fleifel takes inspiration from New Hollywood films centering men on the…
Girls is Lena Dunham’s magnum opus. The irony is that she wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the HBO classic at the ripe age of…