Throughout modern history, pop and rock music have certainly played a crucial role in a broader socio-political history. Filled with joyful and energetic dynamism, the…
Léonor Serraille’s Mother and Son is the sort of coming-of-age film that aims to capture life in both small and broad strokes. With a three-part…
Perhaps the single most of-the-moment film at 2022’s Cannes, Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision feels like it could be ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. A gritty war-time…
Users of the Letterboxd movie review site may be familiar with a guy named Neil Breen. He’s a fellow with a vague background; some believe…
A spy thriller about a curious subject — the power struggle to replace the Grand Imam of al-Azhar — Tarik Saleh’s Boy from Heaven is…
Over the course of his three-feature film career, Japanese filmmaker Juichiro Yamasaki has been at pains to elucidate and track the situation and situatedness of…
In an interview with The Independent, famed French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé stated, “there are terrible things in the world but I am not sure that…
There’s an elusive, ephemeral quality to Clement Cogitore’s Sons of Ramses, a sorta-thriller that unfolds like a half-remembered dream. It’s only his second feature, following…
If one were to point to a contemporary French filmmaker who has most consistently tried to redefine the rom-com genre’s infrastructures within the broader constraints…
Writer-director Emmanuelle Nicot’s Love According to Dalva opens with the titular character (Zelda Samson) being violently separated from her father in their own home at…
La Jauría, the debut film of Colombian director Andrés Ramírez Pulido, is set deep in the jungle at a strange prison camp for boys, a…
A favorite at Cannes for several years now, self-styled arthouse rockstar Albert Serra has had a dependable home at the festival since his (narrative) debut…
In recent years, Damien Manivel seems to have become a latter-day example of the French auteur hiding in plain sight. Like such figures as Paul…
The eponymous protagonist of Domingo and The Mist lives on a dilapidated dairy farm, high in the hilly rainforests of Costa Rica. He spends his…
Serge Bozon’s follow-up to Madame Hyde (2017), Don Juan seems to continue that film’s revisionist update of a classic tale, while also returning in some fashion…
The Worst Ones, the debut film from Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, opens on interviews with the young French people Flemish film director Gabriel (Johan…
Given the ongoing international crisis unfolding in Ukraine, the films of Sergei Loznitsa — born in Belarus but raised in Kiev, and now living in…
March, 2020. In the seaside city of Catania, Italy, a migrant camp prepares for a visit from French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela…
There’s no doubt that a certain flavor of slow-paced, static-master-shot style filmmaking has become a film festival staple. Reporting from any major international fest will…
The official synopsis for Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park reads that “a group of teenagers have to come to terms with the violent death of…
There’s something irresistible about the romantic self-obsessive. If asked, most people would probably not rank their love lives as the most interesting facet of their…