Despite being so nondescript, the title of The Arab actually communicates quite a lot. In the singular nominative, it reduces a specific man or woman…
So rare is contemporary parlance’s penchant for the optimistic, and so sparse are its vocabularies for the beatific, that Cynthia Beatt’s monumental Heart of Light…
The best mysteries always maintain an air of… well, mystery about them. Propelled by the fear, pain, and panic of having all too many questions…
What happens when an act of resistance evolves from a single event into a living condition? In her debut feature, Why Do I See You…
There’s no one out there making them quite like Alan Mak, for better or worse. One-third of the team behind the Infernal Affairs series, along…
Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk, along with their frequent collaborator Olivier Godin, represent an alternative stream of Quebecois cinema, one that is both shoestring…
Charlotte Zhang’s docu-fiction of contemporary and prospective Los Angeles, Tycoon, contends with events both real and imagined, intimate and global. In it we follow Lito…
Among all the defenses for art (as if art ever needed defending), the “timeless and universal” argument has the biggest currency. In this argument, human…
Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is a rarity in the West: a film about the Vietnam War told entirely from the perspective of the Viet…
An unsettling drone hums underneath nearly every scene of Juja Dobrachkous’s sophomore film Accept Our Sincere Apologies, a sound signaling that even seemingly innocuous moments…
Every threat to a sane and healthy life posed by AI is a continuation of some already existing social and political deterioration. Our societal tipping…
Nearly five years ago, Filipino-Australian filmmaker James J. Robinson hit the headlines after breaking into his alma mater St Kevin’s College, Melbourne’s elite all-boys Catholic…
Inside a brightly lit Dunkin’ Donuts, Tyler, a construction worker, meets another, Widgey, who is about to hire him for a home renovation job. Tyler…
Kim Allamand and Michael Karrer’s new film First Days begins with a brief opening text, which reads in part, “in your first days after death…
Bulgarian filmmaker Stefan Kotzev had a more traditional scripted drama in mind for his first feature than what he eventually made. Working in close collaboration…
Richard Bernstein is a consummate performer. Better known as Mickey Squires to connoisseurs of gay pornography and erotic photography, fields in which he was one…
It’s low on the list of 21st century horrors, but there’s something uniquely off-putting about watching a self-recorded video of someone crying. It’s tough to…
Jonathan Rosenbaum included an anecdote on Paul Schrader when writing about the revival of Robert Bresson’s first feature, Les Affaires Publiques (1934). As always, Schrader…
Even when Jorge Luis Borges wrote screenplays, they weren’t necessarily “Borgesian” — not, that is, distilled into the particular pleasure of following one of Borges’…
Long takes involving medium-to-wide shots of landscapes have nearly cemented themselves as festival-cinema staples, so it’s not surprising to see an IFFR Tiger competition film,…
Fuori, the latest film by Italy’s Mario Martone (Nostalgia, The King of Laughter), is curiously inert, especially when you consider that most of the film…