In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13,…
If one were to conjure an impression of the apocalypse, it might be in the heart of sound — a detonation so vast and infinite…
Ashish Avikunthak’s films, like many Asian and African avant-garde films, unfortunately find themselves caught in a tangle of categorization problems when playing in Western festivals.…
It’s a classic conundrum: a documentary focuses on advocacy on a very important topic, and manages to some extent to communicate meaningful information about that…
The 20th century is insistently knocking at our door. The crises of its institutions dominate the news, its tragedies repeating themselves daily as farce. The…
One of the difficulties of navigating the Rotterdam Film Festival as a cinephile is the sheer sprawl of its sections, both in terms of older…
The haze of childhood offers considerable dwelling space for joy and grievance alike; forceful then but mostly latent now, these emotions nonetheless bear the transformative…
Writing in e-flux Journal on Klute’s semicentenary, Isabel Sandoval discussed in detail the immeasurable influence of Alan J. Pakula’s neo-noir crime thriller — especially its…
In any competitive race, the relevant agents can be organized as such: the spectators, who traditionally stay rooted to the spot and view its proceedings…
Why 2025 was a year rich in films with purgatorial motifs — everything from Oliver Laxe’s Sirât to Alex Ullom’s It Ends — is a…
Despite being so nondescript, the title of The Arab actually communicates quite a lot. In the singular nominative, it reduces a specific man or woman…
So rare is contemporary parlance’s penchant for the optimistic, and so sparse are its vocabularies for the beatific, that Cynthia Beatt’s monumental Heart of Light…
The best mysteries always maintain an air of… well, mystery about them. Propelled by the fear, pain, and panic of having all too many questions…
What happens when an act of resistance evolves from a single event into a living condition? In her debut feature, Why Do I See You…
There’s no one out there making them quite like Alan Mak, for better or worse. One-third of the team behind the Infernal Affairs series, along…
Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk, along with their frequent collaborator Olivier Godin, represent an alternative stream of Quebecois cinema, one that is both shoestring…
Charlotte Zhang’s docu-fiction of contemporary and prospective Los Angeles, Tycoon, contends with events both real and imagined, intimate and global. In it we follow Lito…
Among all the defenses for art (as if art ever needed defending), the “timeless and universal” argument has the biggest currency. In this argument, human…
Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is a rarity in the West: a film about the Vietnam War told entirely from the perspective of the Viet…
An unsettling drone hums underneath nearly every scene of Juja Dobrachkous’s sophomore film Accept Our Sincere Apologies, a sound signaling that even seemingly innocuous moments…
Every threat to a sane and healthy life posed by AI is a continuation of some already existing social and political deterioration. Our societal tipping…