Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with…
In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to…
The title of Erica Xia-Hou’s stirring if conspicuous first feature is not a misprint: “banr,” translated and truncated from the Mandarin term for “partner,” serves…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon death,…
In Alice Lowe’s first feature since Prevenge in 2016, which announced the actress and writer as a talented director to boot, we are witness to…
Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of…
In Sandro Aguilar’s 2015 short film, Undisclosed Recipients, two lovers meet at the Paredes de Coura Festival in Portugal. The night is a liquid black,…
Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe has been making exquisite short films for the past several years, works that hold out the suggestion of narrative meaning but…
It may be somewhat surprising to learn that The Last Dance has become the highest-grossing (domestic) film in Hong Kong history, if only because we’re…
Writer-director Aaron Rookus’ film De Idylle (Dutch for Idyllic) presents an interconnected menagerie of death-haunted people — like all of us, they fear death, crave…
While production houses continue to mine disparate art forms for content, the question of how to transpose the art of one medium onto another often…
Boasting roughly a dozen features and a handful of short films, French cineaste Emmanuel Mouret has proven himself a peculiar taste and charm for specific…
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…