Although they are not programmed together at this year’s edition of FIDMarseille, it’s nonetheless intriguing to encounter Christine Baudillon’s Poetique de l’eau alongside Helena Wittmann’s A Thousand…
So many of the dialogues between mortals and immortals in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò end with the gods in agreement that the divines share…
A father dies, the family prepares the deceased for the next life. The simplicity of the premise of Tenzin Phuntsog’s narrative feature debut, Next Life,…
In his first feature Conference of the Birds, director Amin Motallebzadeh borrows a title from a revered source: 12th-century Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar’s allegorical…
Anyone who has made as many masterpieces as the French experimental director Jean-Claude Rousseau deserves his occasional oddities and indulgences, but his new 10-minute short…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is our great purveyor of modern ennui, a chronicler of creeping existential dread as the world we have created now threatens to engulf…
Chop wood, carry water. The well is running dry for the titular noise punk band of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz. Their shows in their hometown…
In Japan, the term jidaigeki — literally translating to “period drama” — is typically ascribed to a genre of samurai film, most commonly set during…
Daihachi Yoshida’s black-and-white character study Teki Cometh follows the daily routines and ruminations of retired French literature professor Gisuke Watanabe (Kyôzô Nagatsuka). Divided into four…
A fabulistic streak tints the proceedings of The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard, David Verbeek’s ninth feature, with a sheen of greyscale anonymity that…
The author Hunter S. Thompson is widely credited with founding the “Gonzo journalism” movement, which is informally defined as incorporating subjective language and satire into…
“Hope is the dream of those who are awake,” muses Nélida (Soledad Pelayo) to her daughter, Elisa (Martina Passeggi), in a display of gentle and…
Movies about the music industry can be a tough pitch. Selling a superstar artist as just that demands either the savviest ear for commercially viable…
There’s much to like about Victoria Franco’s Twelve Moons, a serious-minded drama about loss and addiction that avoids easy platitudes and simplistic moralizing. That is, until…
“I’ve got to start something,” Nino, the eponymous protagonist of Pauline Loquès’ feature debut, announces early in the film to his mother at the kitchen…
Peak Everything (or Amour Apocalypse, its easily translatable French title) is only Anne Émond’s second film to premiere internationally, following Our Loved Ones — easily…
There is no creation without destruction, no light without darkness. When the great colonial powers (great as in imposing, not as in good) of centuries…
Same-sex marriage was legalized in France in 2013, one of many countries to enshrine this right as law in the 2010s as the marriage equality…
There’s a remarkable kind of alchemy at work in Hubert Charuel’s Meteors, an addiction story that transcends the typically staid strictures of the genre to…
There are two kinds of cinephile: those who hear a movie described as “Black Swan on ice” and sneer, noses upturned, their one-line, one-and-a-half star…
In the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, a Kyiv-based auditorium turns into an ad hoc military classroom. Civilians take turns…