Sort of the self-styled bad boy of international festival cinema (catch him on the red carpet in a leather motorcycle jacket), Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco has enjoyed the favor of programmers world over, his work almost always ensured a home at either Cannes or…
Zhang Yimou’s One Second was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, but was pulled at the last, ahem, second for what were claimed to be “technical reasons” widely assumed to be political censorship, due to the film’s Cultural Revolution setting.…
Clio Barnard’s 2010 debut film The Arbor, a documentary/fiction hybrid based on the play by acclaimed writer Andrea Dunbar, features a fascinating formal gambit in which actors lip-synced to actual archival recordings of Dunbar and her daughter, Lorraine. Barnard’s subsequent films, 2013’s The Selfish…
Irish teen Char (Hazel Doupe) lives in a North Dublin housing estate with her Grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie), her uncle Aaron (Paul Reid) and, most importantly, her clearly troubled mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken), who appears to be in the throes of some sort of…
Frequent In Review Online contributor Evan Morgan once posited a more refined version of the slow cinema paradigm that has come to dominate festival films over the past two decades: hammock cinema, in which films that appear to reject storytelling actually rely on a…
The cinema of veteran English auteur Terence Davies has always been concerned with outsiders, whether these are people who live their lower-class lives on the outskirts of society or the highbrow individuals who stand against their elitist social trappings. In 2016’s A Quiet Passion,…
Laurent Cantet stumbles badly with Arthur Rambo, a topical provocation on cancel culture and the evils of social media that feels both toothless and weirdly outdated. A filmmaker known for his humanistic approach to tales of social injustice, Cantet has always managed to find…
Shot on location in a small town on the border between Brazil & Argentina, writer/director Agustina San Martín’s To Kill the Beast occupies a woozy, liminal space between coming-of-age narrative and dreamy reverie. In her video introduction to the film, San Martín calls it…
Not even Haley Lu Richardson’s expected luminosity can save the plainness of the protracted, estranged family drama Montana Story. Seven years after Richardson’s Erin left her family’s ranch in Montana, her abusive, dodgy lawyer of a father lays comatose in his study after suffering…
Antoine Fuqua has made a career out of directing populist, middlebrow fare that seeks nothing more than to entertain audiences for a few hours with slick, soulless thrills. It’s not that Fuqua is necessarily a bad filmmaker, but he’s the epitome of a competent…
