There is a striking early scene with an unknown woman that cuts deep into the sensory motif embedded in the title of May el-Toukhy’s latest…
War is hard to steer away from in the 2026 Venice Film Festival program, where films from Iran (A Bit of Light), Palestine (Citizen Osama),…
In 2025, among the best films of the year, at least according to this very outlet, was Lav Diaz’s Magellan. That work concluded along the…
NAZA is a film so powerful and so utterly terrifying that it should be watched by everyone. And still, it would feel wrong to slot…
The way in which we tell the origin story of a romantic relationship says a lot about how we look at our partners in the…
We, in the modern world, are more connected to one another than ever before, and increasingly so. But are we also lonelier than ever? In…
Only the teeming right-wing critics of mid-20th century Cahiers du Cinéma could have so fervently opposed the notion of political didacticism in film. Needless to…
Bernardo Bertolucci passed away in 2018, but his unfinished film is still echoing. Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber unfurls from the final screenplay Bertolucci conceived,…
“Talk to me in a Continental accent.” That’s what Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel), a Mexican corporate heiress, begs of her Cuban immigrant husband Camilo (Gael García…
Hungarian writer-director Gábor Reisz garnered significant notice on the festival circuit for his third feature film, 2023’s Explanation for Everything. That film was a pointed…
Few filmmakers have confronted the fractures of modern America with such formal rigor and moral devotion as Barbara Kopple. For several decades, the legendary documentarian…
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” So begins Kamel Laaridhi’s debut feature, The H@llow Man, with a quote…
Because of its ability to replicate life, the cinema has long been a preferred medium for exploring the meaning of death. People die in films…
According to the UN, nearly 1,000 Palestinians currently living in Jerusalem face eviction at the hands of the Israeli government. Of those permitted housing, less…
The mononymic Japanese director SABU, despite 30 years of steady work in the offbeat genre film mines, has never broken through in the West in…
Victims of bullying rarely find solace in the solutions of the school administrations that are meant to protect them and will often experience punishment for…
Italian filmmaker Riccardo Giacconi has been making experimental documentaries for the past 15 years. Possibly his best-known film to date is Two (2017), a medium-length…
Chris Hansen is a crusader of the postmodern world. A relentless careerist and ten-time Emmy winner, the Chicago-born media personality weaponized his television appearances in…
Identical twin sisters — so closely connected that they speak in unison, dream the same dreams, and furiously love the same man — dig a…
Film sets tend to be loud, full of people bustling around each other, in one breath bemoaning the lack of budget, materials, and film stock,…
Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has…