Talk of generations forgotten is typically regarded as historical fact, whereas dreams about the desiccated self are frequently dismissed as melodramatic outings a dime a…
It would be naïve to assume a documentary featuring a revolutionary subject would de facto pursue fidelity with the revolution. No artistic mandate exists requiring…
The profane and the sacred prove fairly close in Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples to Heaven. One need look no further than the premise of the…
Yukiko Sode’s slice-of-life epic All the Lovers in the Night clocks in at just under two and a half hours, but feels far more alive…
Watching La Perra, the new film from Dominga Sotomayor, one may be reminded of those pet adoption bumper stickers that read “who rescued who?” In…
The Quran states that “whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity.” The Station, the debut feature from Yemeni…
For the first time in his feature career, Cristian Mungiu has shifted his critical gaze from Romania to its western neighbors. A Cannes luminary par…
As landmark movies go, Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut Freedom could hardly have been less fitting. A documentary/fiction hybrid chronicling one day in the life of…
The very best instances of allegory are those that allow themselves to be completely ignored. Too often, an artist only pretends to be interested in…
Toward the beginning of Too Many Beasts, aging farmer Raoul Brun (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) intentionally runs over several large boars, packs their bodies in the trunk…
Long before Russia commenced its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the winter of 2022, preeminent cineast Andrey Zvyagintsev already saw dark clouds gathering over his…
Sometimes the first shot of a film tells you enough to know you’re in the hands of a great director. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown —…
Karim Lakzadeh seems to be someone who takes his competition titles very seriously. His latest film, Living Twice, Dying Thrice (LTDT from now on), premiering…
Out of the diamond-blue depths of the night sky over southern France, Jean Moulin parachutes down. By the time the film opens in 1943, the…
Harmony Korine gleefully threw genre cinema in the deep fryer with the hitman miasma of Aggro Dr1ft (2023). This year, Nicolas Winding Refn took it…
While possessing the backdrop and aesthetics of a social realist drama, the narrative foundation of writer-director Pierre Le Gall’s debut feature Flesh and Fuel takes…
Surely critics will be quick to note that The Beloved (El ser querido) strongly recalls last year’s Sentimental Value, as Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s seventh feature film…
In The Diary of a Chambermaid, Radu Jude returns to one of his favorite subjects: Europe, as a bad joke. This time, the joke comes…
At the 75th edition of Cannes, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022) sparked considerable attention, premiering in Un Certain Regard. This playfully reimagined portrait of…
Pawel Pawlikowski, the immaculate king of grim black-and-white Eastern European cinema, has made us wait eight years for a new film. After the exquisite moral…
As someone whose first airplane experience was a slightly traumatic flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis not long after 9/11, it was a perplexing experience to…