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…
Zodiac Killer Project is, put simply, a strange undertaking. Charlie Shackleton’s expansively stripped-down documentary emerged from a thwarted attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012…
It’s quite obvious at this point that Netflix has firmed up their annual Christmas lineup formula by tugging at millennials’ soft spots via a mix…
Early on in Under the Flags, the Sun, a banner hoisted by loyalists to Paraguayan dictator General Alfredo Stroessner reads, “The 20th century, with God…
Sylvia Chang has been one of the more under-appreciated forces in international film for almost 50 years now. Beginning her career as an actress in…
Society has always had something of a morbid curiosity with true crime. From Jack the Ripper and In Cold Blood to the near-constant stream of…