In Japan, where customs and a sturdy veneer of politeness greatly determine how people interact with one another, there is a strong emphasis on propriety,…
A visual motif that reoccurs throughout Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, is a spiral staircase. Beyond being chic and Parisian in the way…
“There comes a time when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.” When Sara Jane Moore attempted and…
With all the upheaval in recent years, it seems like there is only one constant across the film industry: producing an independent animated feature is…
Action films might be the closest argument we still have for cinema as a universal language. It’s the most exportable genre, with stars and filmmakers…
Tamara Kotevska’s The Tale of Silyan begins with a recounting of an old Macedonian fable. Young Silyan, tired of backbreaking labor on the family farm,…
In the opening title scroll of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, the Brazil of 1977 the film takes place in is announced as “a…
“The year you were born,” reads the opening title card to Palestine 36. It’s a daunting prescription that also invites the viewer into the story.…
Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a sprawling, expansive work that functions simultaneously as familial remembrance, a documentary on Black intellectualism in the 20th and…
Rian Johnson brought the whodunnit into the 21st century, for better or worse. Knives Out revived it, imbuing the subgenre with the cozy vibes we…
In the 21st century, almost every film beyond a certain tax bracket is transnational in nature. Choose even a lower-budget indie film, ostensibly maintained in…
A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar…
With an education system as corrupt and ineffectual as that of the United States, stories of real teachers making a genuine difference are few and…
It’s June 1993 in rural Nigeria. Remi and his younger brother Akin (real-life brothers Chibuike Marvelous Egbo and Godwin Egbo) are bickering, eating food and…
2024 has shaped up to be a boon year for DIY cinema, with achievements like Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker emerging as critical…
Sincerity is dead at the movies, and this fall season has treated us to a preponderance of autopsies as proof — Bugonia, A House of…
Perhaps we’ve been sold an overly literal version of heaven when we jump at the chance to live forever. While theologians balk at how transactional…
Sequel naming conventions can be a funny thing. The majority will opt for merely adding the next sequential numeral — Roman or otherwise — while…
YouTubers, TikTokers, and Letterboxd users made a major fuss over the desaturated color-grading of Jon M. Chu’s musical Wicked: Part One, turning its visual palette…
Silence — like its two unassuming allies, stillness and slowness — is often positioned as a response to mainstream cinema’s reckless noisiness. But contemporary indie…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…