Imbued with plenty of allure and the potential for surprise, friendly get-togethers and familial gatherings in cinema sustain such an appeal that they never…
The playful vignettes of various cheesemongers, makers, and even competition judges in Ian Cheney’s Shelf Life are much like the dairy product itself —…
Writer-director Qiu Yang’s first feature film, Some Rain Must Fall, begins during monsoon season. Cai (Yu Aier) is in the midst of finalizing her…
Steady hums and inverted camerawork in the early moments of Justin Anderson’s psychological drama Swimming Home are strategies of disorientation, signaling its intent to…
Dogs occupy a unique, almost sacred, space in our lives. They are not technically human, yet they embody qualities — loyalty, affection, intelligence —…
The erotic thriller has encountered a resurgence in popularity of late, partly due to how well the genre plays at home, making it ideal…
Following Red Rocket in 2021, Anora marks Sean Baker’s second straight feature in competition at Cannes, and this one comes with reports of packed…
The fraternal duo of Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu have been making films together for around 25 years. An early featurette of theirs, Roland’s Pass…
Once upon a time, there were frightened people. They were so frightened that their imagination escaped,” says a soothing, soft, and elderly feminine voice.…
Following the critical success of 2018’s The Wolf House, directoral duo Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña have returned with The Hyperboreans, a papier-mâché melange…
In Retreat, the debut feature from Iranian-born Ladhaki director Maisam Ali, is the sort of film one hates to be negative about. It’s made…
The Cannes Film Festival has a reputation (not entirely undeserved) for skewing its selections toward the more abstruse, audience-unfriendly end of the international cinema…
Writing on Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Bloody Oranges back in 2022, InRO’s Matt Lynch described it as a “glib little attempt at satirizing The Way We…
In Western countries, the dailiness in those “lesser developed” ones has long been abstracted by a dearth of artistic and cultural diffusion from one…
Moral judgments in artwork tend to be tinged in shades of gray. This is sometimes expressed by citing Jean Renoir’s unofficial motto that “everyone…
The Shameless feels very much like an art-sploitation entry from the mid-’90s, when directors thought that a frank depiction of lesbian desire, in and…
Cordoned to a cultural temperament that favors realism, based-on-true-stories, and the animated mythologies of men and women who have walked among us, the biopic…
The depiction of grief in films is as variable as film form. It can be outwardly melodramatic like in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue…