There was a time not so very long ago where, hard as it is to believe these days, East Asian cinema was commonplace among the…
“It’s amazing to be able to create something that others don’t understand at all.” So says an elderly woman to the aspiring punk singer-songwriter of…
Jacqueline Zünd’s documentary Heat takes place across the Persian Gulf, one of the hottest spots on planet Earth today. Though not because of the ongoing…
The redundant fatigue from the influx of Russo-Ukrainian war documentaries remedies itself if one begins to recognize their level of artistic excellence. One such effective…
In 2020, HBO began airing one of the funniest and most significant docuseries in the history of the form, How To With John Wilson, in…
The opening shot of Dutch director Jona Honer’s documentary Club Heaven plunges us into the heart of the “Playhouse” club in Chengdu. A perfectly symmetrical…
It’s hard to do justice to the images in Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming through words alone. Their quality is of a blinkered, bleary kind, as…
At this point in film history, the city of Los Angeles has been photographed in absurdum. However, the particular neighborhoods in Anouk Moyaux’s Selegna Sol…
Over a small jetty, a cruise ship waits to dock and its passengers get ready to dismount. The process is unrushed, methodical; a throng of…
In German, Kai Stänicke’s debut feature Trial of Hein bears the title Der Heimatlose, which translates as “the stateless person” or “the homeless.” This is…
If one were being deliberately reductive, the logline for Dutch director-screenwriter Rosanne Pel’s sophomore film Donkey Days could read as a near-exact twin of Joachim…
In the first half of Fantasy, Isabel Pagliai’s feature debut, it is easy to become fixated on Fatty, the Calico-mix cat who lives with the…
The international breakthrough of All We Imagine as Light in 2024, which was the first Indian film to play in Cannes competition in 30 years,…
When you see a lot of movies at film festivals, you begin to notice certain patterns in the cinema as a whole. One such pattern…
Originally popularized and coveted by the Western world, the esteemed traveler cut a formidable figure for its elites: the rationalists for their admiration of breathtaking…
Much digital ink has been spilled over whether now, more than ever, we need positive queer images in popular media. As the world skids further…
Clemente Castor’s Cold Metal is a difficult film to wrap one’s head around. It’s a small-scale, profoundly opaque object that rejects traditional narrative in favor…
Social realism is alive and well and living in Belgium — but you knew that already, given that it’s the Dardennes’ home court. It may…
If, with Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino set a 21st century standard for leisurely, sun-dappled, queer coming-of-age films, then, nearly a decade later,…
Why are filmmakers today so afraid of melodrama? Many’s a recent feature, from the acclaimed (Celine Song’s Past Lives) to the less so (Luca Guadagnino’s…
Where do you go once you’ve reached the top? By 2007, Juliette Binoche was running out of peaks to summit: she’d won international acclaim with…