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…
Nothing elicits an emotional response quite like a shock. Things hit harder when you haven’t had time to prepare for them — the funniest…
What can we understand as agency, for individuals placed into contexts that are fabricated in dehumanizing forms? How does the capacity for someone to…
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…
The exorcism and possession subgenre has been at a creative stall basically since its heyday in the 1970s. The panoply of genre tropes looks…
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…
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…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary…
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…
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…
The death of a loved one is fundamental to the human condition, with the ensuing grief making way for an odyssey of pain and…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
One of the most interesting things that writer/director Christian Swegal does in his new film Sovereign is forgoing any introductory text scrawl or blatant…
30 minutes into Jem Cohen’s new film Little, Big, and Far, the viewer watches a mostly vacant mall parking lot slowly descend into darkness.…
Cynical perhaps, but it feels safe to assume in 2025 that a majority of Americans do not know that Rhodesia was a country, let…