Located somewhere in the Pacific Ocean — a body of water so macroscale it covers nearly half of the planet in terms of surface area and depth — is a relatively small island group built on borrowed time. Or, more specifically, the crisis surrounding…
In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori — whose existence in Byron’s mansion resembled something more like an in-house drug dealer than a typical country doctor —…
In Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing, an intensely personal diary of remembrance and catharsis, the director receives a box of photographs taken during her childhood with her three brothers, two of whom have since passed away. The negatives, stored away for many years, now see…
After five uninterrupted minutes of a camera looking out a train window at the passing greenery — we know it’s a camera looking and not just a person, because we can see the reflection of the camera in the reflection of the window opposite…
Fighter is that rare film able to work within a typically male framework — here, the underdog boxing flick — and translate it to a powerful woman’s story, without really altering much of anything. Lim Sung-mi plays a North Korean who stumbles into amateur…
Retreating from the weight of actions into the weightlessness of words, Denis Côté’s latest finds a rambunctious solace in the oratorial. Serving possibly as a stylistic antithesis to 2019’s dialogue-free Wilcox (centered around the life of a drifter), the opportunely-titled Social Hygiene recalls, instead,…
One of last year’s standouts, Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, traced the trajectory of a writer from his idealistic roots towards a solipsistic cynicism at the end of his career. In fellow Italian countryman Fabrizio Ferraro’s narrative feature The Luminous View, we find a similarly…
The COVID pandemic kept Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden out of U.S. cinemas (settling for a virtual-only release) in 2020, but the film’s much-hyped 2019 festival run translated into stateside celebration nevertheless, amusingly culminating in an Obama cosign. The film’s appeal is readily apparent, even…
Alexandre Koberidz’s first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again, begins with the maxim, “Love has no end — a story always has,” followed by, “You will now see: a lovestory.” This cleft within the romantic drama’s conventionally pleasing, if quaint, narrative and temporal…
We are asked: what of the implications of these encounters? What of the markings left by a history: markings that will elude the act of their initial etch? In Truong-Minh Quy’s follow-up to his debut feature The Tree House — a postcolonial science fiction…
