“The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills to Pay (or…
The middle class context of Kostis Charamountanis’ Kyuka: Before Summer’s End gives its story of a languid, European summer vacation a refreshingly dressed-down feel.…
One of the harshest realities in life is a lack of closure. The sudden death of a loved one, the dissolution of a serious…
The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism,…
Anyone who has spent time with someone suffering from dementia has seen a loved one lie to them. These are not lies of malice;…
Filmmaker Pete Ohs’ working methods prioritize flexibility, openness, and spontaneity. As with all of his features so far, his latest, The True Beauty of…
In Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) vaults through an endless sequence of parallel realities, searching for a universe where…
Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player)…
Given the real-life horrors of a global pandemic and an increasingly hostile socio-political climate, it’s no wonder that post-apocalyptic fiction is as en vogue…
In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I wanted…
Quebecois director Denis Côté is something of a cinematic explorer. Over the course of his 25-year career, he has established himself as one of…
One often encounters the (admittedly lazy) critical idea that a particular film “would’ve been better as a short,” suggesting that whatever ideas or formal…
In 2014, the Dutch filmmaking duo of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan made a film called Episode of the Sea, collaborating with…
Whatever else one can say about the merits of experimental film, “it looks expensive” is typically not one of the usual citations. Malena Szlam’s…
When Armand Yervant Tufenkian worked as a fire lookout in the forests of Central California, his protracted, expectant gazing into the distance made him…
In Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature, Evidence, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, the conspiracy theory adopts a progressive slant. With Schmitt’s…
Though plenty of movies have been made either focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic in a literal way, and even more movies had been converted…
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…