Matching the restless anomie of its cityscapes, or perhaps in contrast to their flurry of homogenous activity, Li Dongmei’s Guo Ran foregrounds an inscrutable austerity…
As far as titles go, few films are as aptly and succinctly summed up by their own as Transcending Dimensions. The latest project from Toshiaki…
In her fifth feature film, Turkish director Pelin Esmer adopts a self-reflexive approach to storytelling. While the attempt is admirable and occasionally intriguing, And the…
Filmed almost entirely on location in the dense forests of Sikkim, the northeasternmost state of India, Bhargav Saikia’s Bokshi is a wildly ambitious debut feature,…
I watched two films from IFFR’s 2025 festival: one was The Last Dance, the smash hit Hong Kong family melodrama set in the world of…
The films of Amit Dutta have always been concerned with exploring and re-imagining art forms through cinema, deepening the possibilities of both the art and…
A cause celebre the moment the trailer was released, Bad Girl prompted attacks on its more famous producer, the director Vetrimaaran, for portraying oppression in…
Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be…
Lois Patiño begins his new film Ariel by spatially positioning Shakespeare’s The Tempest within the frame, as the image of an island opens as if…
Last year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Estonian art film 8 Views of Lake Biwa translated a Japanese storytelling tradition of “eight views”…
As loglines go, a Chloë Sevigny-narrated, archive-heavy documentary about an infamous, largely discredited dolphin scientist has a kind of whimsical ring to it. And indeed,…
The first shot of Julian Chou’s film Blind Love is both jarring and literal: a closeup of a doctor draining a cyst under a twitching…
“Is what you’re doing worth a child’s tears?” a stranger asked Georgian filmmaker Nutsa Gogoberidze as she was heading off to make her film Uzhmuri…
There are few rings of cinematic hell worse than bad broad comedies. Watching Rasmus Merivoo’s Alien 2 or: The Return of Valdis in 17 Episodes…
Arriving at the Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia this year, I found myself witness to a brewing controversy. Deaf Lovers, a new film…
“This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening…
Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s (L for Leisure, Two Plains & a Fancy) new film Dream Team boasts two assets not often paired together in…
While the experimental “sidebar” screenings at larger film festivals receive more than their share of critical attention, they only have so many slots to program.…
The Gloria of your Imagination, the new experimental feature from Jennifer Reeves, arrives at a moment when the future of women’s autonomy is an open…
While the bibliographic career of Michel Houellebecq has never failed to court intrigue, praise, and rancor, his filmed performances have garnered relatively little attention. Perhaps…
Favoriten (2024), Ruth Beckermann’s latest, rolls production titles over a series of children’s drawings of buildings. Following a nigh universal youthful design scheme, the drawings…