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 on…
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 Live…
In Western countries, the dailiness in those “lesser developed” ones has long been abstracted by a dearth of artistic and cultural diffusion from one to…
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 has…
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 of…
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 has…
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 (1993),…
When first introduced at the beginning of Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Around, a couple, Ale (Itsaso Ariana) and Alex (Vito Sanz), have already decided…
Longtime Tsai fans might recall that he officially retired from making feature films back in 2013. He must’ve been in some kind of a mood,…
One of the unique features of Emilia Beatriz’s new film barrunto is the omnipresence of sur- and subtitles, translating between Spanish and English, differentiating between…
Critic Alex Fields has called Joost Rekveld’s films “glimpses into secret patterns that underlie our physical reality.” While abstracted images engineered from analog computers are…
Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night is a film of patterns — in its geography, which functions as both an exploration of a library and…
New Directors/New Films takes a certain amount of pride in the names they’ve launched, and it’s not unjustified: any festival that can boast Hou Hsiao-Hsien,…
A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film, from…
In his book Codes For North, filmmaker and film historian Stephen Broomer posits a history of experimental film as an “art that is a contest…
There’s really nothing wrong with The Permanent Picture, the debut feature from Catalan director Laura Ferrés. It features two skillful lead performances, is exceedingly well…
The sophomore film from Brazilian director André Novais Oliveira is a charming cinematic miniature that observes the unfolding of an ordinary day that potentially evolves…
The inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies closed this past Sunday with the world premiere of Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar’s outrageous…
James Benning’s 2021 film The United States of America works through 50 landscapes, one from each state in alphabetical order, only to end its credits…
Dane Komljen’s previous film, Afterwater (2022), is a triptych exploring the boundaries of humanity’s relationship with gender and the environment. It begins with an observational…
Mixed media artist Zhou Tao’s new film, The Periphery of the Base, playing now at Cinéma du Réel and totalling just 53 minutes across a…