Two depressed guys, a remote location, and loads of shit hitting the fan. Martin McDonagh doesn’t need much more to make sophisticated black comedies that…
In Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, grief bums around like a third wheel. It is needy, morose, fickle; the sort of guest that says they’re not…
Love buds during summer on an idyllic Korean island. At least, it does for Jin (Sim Su-bin), a 17-year-old girl native to the island. Her…
As a certain theory of Baudrillardian post-intellectualism would have it, we now live in what could be referred to as an “anti” age — an…
Hong Kong cinema is dying, or at least so says the BBC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQd3BiwYM1E). But keen observers will note that Hong Kong cinema, like cinema itself,…
The power wielded by Thierry Frémaux and the Cannes Film Festival is such that countries can become defined, for a decade or even longer, by…
The 2026 Toronto International Film Festival seems intent on making lightning strike twice. Last year, Obsession went from a Midnight Madness premiere to one of…
Director Michael Dowse is no stranger to the rough-edged antihero, but perhaps he’s a bit less in touch with the management of thematic conciliation when…
Volcano as woman, women as volcanoes. This simile describes the driving force behind Idda, Italian director Irene Dionisio’s deeply affecting memory film about a symbiotic…
The new film from Australian horror director Nick Kozakis, Kick On is the sort of movie designed to play TIFF’s Midnight Madness and excite a…
In August 1974, during a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Korea’s liberation at the end of World War II, the first lady of Korea,…
Toronto-based filmmaker Yuula Benivolski has made several impressive short films, the most recent of which, why I never became a driver, played several experimental film…
In the backseat of her parents’ car, an eight-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) searches the word “rape” on her mother’s phone. We only see her face…
If anyone watches The Violinist, there is a good chance this has something to do with the spotlight thrown upon it by its being awarded…
The pressure of representation weighs heavily on Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog. With its accessible arthouse style and the sobriety of its subject…
Guatemala on-screen is underrepresented, fertile territory. Mad Mel’s Apocalypto is likely the region’s highest profile depiction, or you could look toward El Norte from Gregory…
Argentinean director Benjamín Naishtat garnered notice about 15 years ago, primarily with a trio of innovative, highly unusual feature films. 2014’s History of Fear was a nearly abstract nocturne focused on the various ways that a society can break down, turning its participants against one another. On a meta-level, it was about the different ways
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As the popular online adage goes, Cinephilia is a disease, and few exemplify this better than filmmakers themselves. Shaped by the forms, narratives and dramaturgies that constituted their cinematic initiation, filmmakers often find it difficult to go beyond these formative (pun intended) experiences, trapped seemingly forever by their anxieties of influence, to borrow the title
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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…