It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s The Idiot(s) hates its subjects. The film purports to chronicle the events around Fyodor…
Passion is subsumed into stricture in Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering, a graceful Burmese drama about the relationship between two colleagues at a garment factory. Patient…
Sometimes, the riskiest thing to do can be to play it safe. With her 2016 breakthrough and solo directorial debut, Wolf and Sheep, Shahrbanoo Sadat…
Luca Guadagnino’s neo-realist farce Artificial presents a parade of dipshits: 1) figuratively, as it introduces us to the careless architects of what many believe is…
“Can the copy of something embody the truth of its original self?” The world we have built for ourselves is an ersatz one. We gaze…
In Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon, Josette (Josette Kwanya) is a widowed 80-year-old living alone in her vast house. All her children are scattered…
A couple of weeks ago, I went to a screening of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (2013) at the Metrograph in Lower Manhattan. I am a…
Ava DuVernay’s 13th is one of the most influential documentaries of the 21st century, for better or worse. Released at the tipping point between the…
After having seen A Real Pain, one might ascribe a certain set of proclivities to Jesse Eisenberg-as-director: an easygoing affability, a penchant for the gentle…
Kogonada’s latest film has a “latest by Kogonada” problem. The video-essayist-turned-director burst onto the scene with Columbus (2017), a quiet, poetic meditation on friendship and…
There are exactly two minutes and 39 seconds in which Harrison Atkins’ second feature operates as a straightforward slice of ineffectual mumblecore. We follow our…
The magic of the digital world allows us to be instantly and perpetually connected with one another. Childhood friends, high school crushes, former co-workers, distant…
Riptides is a dark comedy about a simple man who, inspired by the words of a self-help author, tries to revolutionize his life and ends…
Theodore Schaefer’s sophomore feature announces itself right from the jump, with a free-flowing camera flying, crashing, and zooming through modern New York City as if…
Geese, for lack of a better word, is good. Heirs apparent to the art-rock mantle, they reign in the arena less because they deserve the…
German director Luise Donschen follows her own path, to put it mildly. Her 2018 debut feature, Casanova Gene, was a daring conceptual project that, in…
Even among the film festival cognoscenti, experimental films sometimes inspire their fair share of confusion. This is to be expected, since the films in question…
The obvious thing to say about Dan Sallitt’s new film, What Can’t Be Mentioned, is that it can’t be fully appreciated without first seeing its…
As the title would have us to expect, Beatrice Gibson’s At Night is indeed (mostly) a nocturnal film, but Gibson does so much more than…
Having seen all six Currents shorts programs at this year’s New York Film Festival, Program 3: Surface Noise emerged as the most successful of the…
Alex Serian has been away for a long time. At the start of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, the gifted cellist (played with great commitment by Pedro…