In the opening scenes of Cai Shangjun’s The Sun Rises on Us All, a woman in her mid-30s, Meiyun (Xin Zhilei), is getting an ultrasound.…
“I wonder if it’s like being inside an aquarium,” remarks sixteen-year-old Choo Xin Yu (Ranice Tay) as she sits for her Ordinary Level examinations. Facing…
Living in Brazil in a post-Bolsonaro world clearly feels dystopian to director Gabriel Mascaro, who has now made two consecutive films about a near-future where…
Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke is a delight, a playful formalist in a sea of self-serious festival auteurs. But because comedy is often viewed askance by…
Tasha Hubbard’s debut fiction work is a clear-eyed, frustrating compound of incomplete scenes and rounded emotional resonance, where characters speak in terms defined either by…
A visual motif that reoccurs throughout Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, is a spiral staircase. Beyond being chic and Parisian in the way…
In addition to being the leading auteur working in the Inuktitut language, director Zacharias Kunuk has been a standard bearer for Indigenous cinema more generally…
Content is the new oil. In Babystar, the debut feature from German director Joscha Bongard, the 16-year-old Luca (Maja Bons) is the center of both…
Aki is a film of abundance. The world it envisions and celebrates is lifegiving and beautiful. Most of Aki, a title that translates from Anishinaabemowin…
One could argue that it speaks to the humanistic timelessness of The Bicycle Thieves that it just keeps getting remade, with the circumstances adapted to…
The first of this year’s Wavelengths short film programs begins, appropriately enough, with Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, a 2016 work by Tomonari…
Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts with his…
Just as the prospect of taking root in one place imposes an uneasiness on the mind, so too does relocation prompt a restlessness of the…
With Short Summer, writer/director Nastia Korkia has created an exquisite, evocative portrait of a rapidly disintegrating world told almost entirely through the eyes of a child.…
The grist mill of capitalism has no shortage of critics today, incisive policymakers and inane pedants alike who know too well the anonymous and alienated…
Filmmaker Julian Schnabel returns to a familiar topic with his In the Hand of Dante… sort of. The painter-turned-acclaimed filmmaker has dedicated most of his…
For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how so few contemporary filmmakers…
Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has…
Russian luminary Alexander Sokurov delivers another curveball. Following Fairytale, his 2022 animated feature about notorious leaders of the 20th century languishing in purgatory, Sokurov offers…
A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies…
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over a decade after the annexation of Crimea, a desire to put the inner…