In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels devoid…
In the opening scene of Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, the film introduces one of its two heroines in a hospital clinic: a young Italian…
In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First Reformed…
Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in a…
First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever, a…
Only a few minutes into his 100,000,000,000,000, 48-year-old French filmmaker Virgil Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis) presents to viewers a gang of four young escorts who,…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of proving…
The most emotionally and spiritually invigorating faith-based films rely not on proselytization or condemnation, but on abstraction. Their dramatic force comes from their characters’ tormented…
Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age sensibilities…
Despite his increasing arthouse acclaim, Radu Jude has never been associated with a distinct stylistic stamp; indeed, he has long flitted between various formalist modes,…
Death Will Come, German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s latest feature (and first French-language production), follows a contract killer, Tez (Sophie Veerbeck), who is hired by an…
For a certain type of documentary, intimate access to one’s subject is a double-edged sword. Leila Amini’s debut film is a close look at her…
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of André Forcier, the writer-director of the new comedy Ababooned. But he is actually one of the grand…
The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows his…
Anyone who follows any artform closely — in this case, cinema, but it’s equally true for music, painting, sculpture, literature, what have you — knows…
Post-apocalyptic visions in mainstream cinema usually serve a practical, introductory function, providing a digestible dose of world-building before plunging the audience into the crux of…
In Miguel Llansó’s latest, three young women fall under the strange spell of Dr. Mindfulness, whom they meet on a virtual reality dating app and…
It has become a somewhat common tactic for documentary filmmakers in the digital age to turn to the supercut as a way to sift through…
2024 has shaped up to be a boon year for DIY cinema, with achievements like Hundreds of Beavers and The People’s Joker emerging as critical…
Horror and comedy share much in common. Both are affect-driven genres that hinge on build-up and release while helping us navigate through cultural taboos. For…
In her 2019 memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin grapples with the aftermath of a near-fatal bear attack in the…