When 20-something pianist Donna (Dana Namerode) receives a diagnosis of bone cancer in her hand, she explores different avenues for physical and mental health treatment,…
In what is somehow 19-year-old filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s fifth feature, Carnage for Christmas, genres abound. Though a slasher makes up the bones of the…
Pandemic films seem to arrive now with an amount of healthy attendant skepticism. Do we really want to keep reliving these moments of our lives?…
Writing about the recent Cuckoo, critic Willow Maclay asks: “does a film starring a trans person have a duty to say something specific about transness?”…
“The physical world relies on a much more complex universe. Like fish who cannot see the water they are in, we are immersed in something…
In Tiger Stripes, Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature, a trio of twelve-year-old girls contend with the sudden and inexplicable physical changes that occur inside one…
Writer/director Alice Maio Mackay is 18 years old; it seems almost obligatory that this be mentioned as her third feature film, T Blockers, premieres at…
Dutch director Sacha Polak set a very high bar for herself with Hemel, her 2012 debut feature. Raw and at times agonizing, Hemel is a…
Written and directed by Erblin Nushi, I Love You More is a delicate film which explores the heartbreak of queer adolescence. The film centers on…
There are strange goings-on in the Stains suburbs of France, an assemblage of stark high-rise buildings that are home to a collection of everyday working-class…
Patricia Mazuy, now six films deep in a three-decade-plus career with Saturn Bowling, has always risked a certain, tantrum-centric filmmaking, favoring characters with shared psychoses…
Since I was a boy, gaunt and ghoulish, raised on the children’s renditions of Edgar Allan Poe and those silly Goosebumps books, I’ve been obsessed…
Spanish-language filmmaker Ruth Caudeli has developed a surprisingly consistent and quantifiable body of work in the past few years. Her films are relatively plotless, centering…
Missing sometimes suffers from unfocused digressions, but it mostly coheres well by the end and marks Katayama as a director to follow. Satoshi Harada (Jirô…
Onoda documents how the collapse of one’s worldview can prove as wrenching as any of the violence here depicted, and reminds that cinema is an inescapably…
The Passenger boasts a duo of capable directors behind the camera, but little beyond the impressive visuals lands with any force. Those looking for a…
Mascarpone vacillates between insight and one-dimensionality, but its luscious aesthetic character keeps its lightly recommendable. Gay Italian drama Mascarpone certainly knows how to appease its target…
Human Nature’s looping narrative games don’t always work, but overall the film makes for an effective study of middle-class malaise. There’s not one, but two structural/temporal gambits…
Bloody Oranges is late-’90s Tarantino knockoff adorned with finger-wagging political window dressing. Partway through alleged French comedy Bloody Oranges is an epigraph from Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (yes,…
Mother Schmuckers is sub-John Waters more-busting that fails to understand the essential appeal of its inspirational touchstone. American audiences encountering the Belgian gross-out comedy Mother Schmuckers…
Potato Dreams of America is an uneven, arrhythmic effort that undermines its early promise with a blunted second half. If Marvel’s Wandavision has left you…