Argentinian filmmaker Melisa Liebenthal’s 2019 short film, Aquí y Allá (“Here and There”), utilized Google Earth, in-film, to pinpoint the exact location where it was…
Ariadine Zampaulo’s Maputo Nakuzandza begins with a distressingly bleak sequence: a group of boys approach an open car and peer inside, commenting on an unseen…
Giraffe is often beautiful, but strikes an imbalance between its form and its flagging emotional core. Frequently beautiful but frustratingly opaque, Anna Sofia Hartmann’s Giraffe plays…
Jean-Claude Rousseau may be one of the best-kept secrets in world cinema. But fortunately, in recent years, the word seems to be getting out. Although…
Abbas Kiarostami’s 2008 film Shirin is constructed entirely of closeups of faces as spectators react to a film playing in front of them. But the…
Luke Fowler’s latest feature film reflects a slight shift in his creative project, something that might not be immediately apparent even to longtime admirers of…
Most of La Bonga takes place in darkness; just flashlights serve as key lights while voices (voiceovers? diegetic?) guide the shaky frame to an invisible…
While global headlines are presently dominated by Russia’s ongoing onslaught of imperialist atrocity, Alexander Abaturov’s Paradise turns its eye to the country’s east, where casual…
At times, Laberint Sequences, the new short film by Blake Williams, feels a bit like an experimental feature, despite being only 20 minutes long. That’s…
In her remarkable 2021 book on James Benning’s Ten Skies, critic and scholar Erika Balsom remarks that the film “at once rewards a close attention…
The ghosts of the Vietnam War now outrank the survivors. After fifty years, it may as well be ancient history, with Ken Burns’ recent documentary,…
Best known as one of three credited writers on Joseph Kahn’s 14-minute Power Rangers (2015) short — alongside the director and James Van Der Beek,…
In his landmark 1993 work Culture and Imperialism, historian Edward W. Said observes, “peoples being conscious of themselves as prisoners in their own land… returns…
In the summer of 1969, thousands of music fans gathered for a once-in-a-lifetime show that would change the course of rock history. Bona fide legends…
There have been a number of meta-cinematic works over the years that detail the plans for a film that a maker had in mind, but…
Somewhere along the line, not all that long ago, Arnaud Desplechin ceased to be a marketable name in the U.S. film biz. While certainly never…
The latest film from French actor-director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is difficult to evaluate. One could argue that, for what it is, it is fairly accomplished. A…
Ballet school drama Neneh Superstar is the kind of film that gives festivals like Rendez-Vous with French Cinema a reason to reach out to younger…
Three Nights a Week is less the love story between a straight man and a drag queen it has been billed as, and rather a…
Classified as a documentary in the Berlin festival catalog, Tatiana Huezo’s new film The Echo is more accurately clarified as a scripted film shot on…
In experimenting with narrative in the cinema, we take on a capacity for expression that currently has no real affinities or structures. The imagination that…