The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of realism.…
The worst thing a film — or any other form of art — can do is work too hard to be about something. This is…
Desire Lines is a hybrid film that understands the themes it wants to address, but struggles to find the formal means. Part conventional talking heads…
With its title referring to the scar left behind by a suicidal person who hesitates and fails to deliver a mortal wound, Selman Nacar’s Hesitation…
“Camels are adored by their jockeys,” a Bedouin camel herder sings out to the snow-covered desert at the beginning of Abu Bakr Shawky’s Hajjan. Inside…
Symbols are like Alfred Hitchcock’s (flawed) definition of drama — “life with the dull bits cut out.” Their universal appeal derives from prioritizing a familiar…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to the…
There’s no denying the contemporary trend to “narrativize” otherwise fact-based documentaries, filmmakers shaping reams of footage into something resembling the three-act structure of the average…
One of the most discussed Estonian films of the year, Dark Paradise is a strange beast from one of the country’s most promising and rising…
Free Solo, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s 2018 documentary, was a visually stunning document of a truly impressive feat: Alex Honnold climbing the entirety…
Until 2021, France did not have a set legal age of consent. Then Vanessa Springora wrote Le Consentement in 2020, an autobiographical memoir about her…
After dipping his toes in the waters of English-language filmmaking, Yorgos Lanthimos makes his return to his Greek roots with Bleat, inviting a cadre of…
We Don’t Talk Like We Used To, the title of Joshua Gen Solondz’s latest film, has a few potential meanings to account for. The first…
Few directors have explored the implications of real-time continuity — or a reasonable approximation thereof — as resolutely as Romanian director Cristi Puiu. From his…
After his disappointing 2021 film The Restless, a film in which a story of an artist’s manic episodes mostly provided an opportunity for actorly histrionics,…
An artist and documentary filmmaker, Eléonore Saintagnan makes her feature debut with Camping du Lac, although such a biographical description does little to adequately describe…
Nicole Midori Woodford’s Last Shadow at First Light occupies an exasperating middle ground between heartfelt sincerity and hoary cliché, exploring generational trauma and survivor’s guilt…
When I worked the film scanner at a home media transfer house, among the foremost moldy delights I could regularly expect to find on my…
Amidst the ongoing renaissance of Indigenous art, there is one existential crisis that is rarely addressed: First Nations’ access to clean, drinkable water. It’s not…
Before He Thought He Died (2023), a friend spoke on his misgivings about 88:88 (2016), Isaiah Medina’s hitherto best-known film, echoing sentiments that sounded familiar.…
The late Chinese, Tibetan minority filmmaker Pema Tseden is no stranger to the Western international film festival circuit (which is also the case for many…