Where experimental film is concerned, that subsection we call “structural film” is characterized by a radical transparency. This may seem like an odd claim to…
More than a decade after his first feature, For the Plasma (2014), Bingham Bryant revisits his fascination with images, interpretation, and, crucially, the ways images…
A camera navigates the Mediterranean’s vast cerulean depths. Its gaze is foreign and robotic — an intruder within a dark maritime realm intensely averse to…
Given that present-day existence has been thrown into disarray by — in roughly chronological order — the smartphone, COVID-19, and the resurgence of fascism, how…
“I have to find a way.” This opening voiceover, soothing yet fraught with anxiety, doesn’t initially sound ironic. It sounds sincere, and fitting, as the…
Shireen Seno’s short film you dreamt you saw yourself but couldn’t see your face begins with a small video image situated in the center of…
A longtime favorite filmmaker at InRO, this writer had only seen one work by Nicolás Pereda, Minotaur (2015) — a surreal exploration of stasis and…
Like few other working filmmakers, Ted Fendt has created for himself a functioning cinematic universe, full of characters seeking creative and intellectual stimulation and answers…
As they so often do, sixtysomething Bulgarian couple Marina (Tanya Shahova) and Gosha (Ivan Savov) spend their evening in front of the television after a…
Reverberation usually describes the phenomenon of a reflected and delayed sound impulse that, attenuated to the perceiving ear, has diverted into different manifestations from its…
Despite crediting the scholar and film critic Andrei Rus as a co-director, the latest and possibly trolliest Radu Jude film is really more of an…
At 87 minutes, Jean-Claude Rousseau’s Last Stop for the Circular Ticket is the longest film he’s made since his 1995 masterpiece The Enclosed Valley, but…
Major credit is due to KVIFF for continuing to world-premiere some of the roughest documentaries from the Ukrainian frontline. Two years ago, the festival unveiled…
Hidden in a nook of the Île d’Yeu cemetery, the grave of Marshal Philippe Pétain has grown into a symbolic site of contention for the…
Two young boys, one reserved and one outgoing, become fast friends at elementary school in Kohei Kadowaki’s ambitious and thoughtful animated film We Are Aliens,…
Among civilized Europe, the French as a collective may have a unique predilection for social dysfunction, or at least a unique openness to confronting and…
As an adult, returning to watch a beloved film from childhood can be a most delightful experience. That which charmed you then may still charm…
Since its debut 151 years ago, Georges Bizet’s enduring and controversial opera Carmen has inspired dozens of adaptations across mediums as varied as film, Broadway,…
The animated documentary, by its very definition, is contradictory. Neither form wants to acknowledge the other’s existence because doing so shatters the convenient illusion that…
Achingly personal films, theoretically, should be everywhere. Technology for the production of moving images is available to more people now than ever before. If one…
With her first feature since 2019’s Black Christmas remake, Sophia Takal’s Act One returns to some of the same obsessions and fascinations as 2016’s Always Shine, her breakthrough second film…