Director Carl Elsaesser was teaching at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota when he learned of Joan Thurber Baldwin (1927-1990). She was a poet, amateur architect,…
We’ve all been told not to look at the sun before. We’ll go blind, they said; they told us in explicit detail the permanent damage…
A fascinating thesis and accompanying history lesson that never quite makes sense as a feature-length film, Travis Wilkerson & Erin Wilkerson new documentary Nuclear Family is trying to…
Fatherly guardedness is what defines Jean-René Etangsalé in the memory of his daughter, filmmaker and documentarian Erika Etangsalé. His being tight-lipped, however, was more a…
Post-Dardenne social realism all too often functions as safe-enough filler material for international film fest lineups, but director Kim Se-in rather confidently finds her own…
Kinetic films that depict their restless women protagonists either in quenchless quest for their dreams or in non-stop endeavor to clear various obstacles should be…
You’d be forgiven if you mistook Shô Miyake’s new film, Small, Slow but Steady, for a documentary about the forest floor’s invisible undergrowth, or maybe…
Far from being a new director or a new film, Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s third feature Once Upon a Time in Calcutta speaks to a director…
There’s something to be said for the narrative and structural principles of incoherence, attempting to evoke a fractured place, culture, or time through a jumble…
The South Korean drama Hot in Day, Cold at Night is nothing if not timely in its portrait of an unnamed, twenty-something couple desperately trying…
Chinese documentary has long been a vibrant and all too underseen area of filmmaking, even before the international recognition of masters like Jia Zhangke and…
Miryam Charles’ feature debut is a member of the final Talent to Watch cohort, prior to the industry intervention that would reshape it. Talent to…
How exactly to represent historical atrocities on screen has been an overriding ethical and formal concern for filmmakers for almost as long as the medium…
Beginning life as a multimedia installation mixing sculpture, film, and paper archival documents, Éric Baudelaire’s When There Is No More Music to Write project has…
Capturing the fuzzy conceptual and materialist fluidity of modern globalization has become something of a go-to subject for contemporary non-fiction film. It’s a huge, even…
Babi Yar. Context is another notable work from Loznitsa, one that represents an important act of remembrance while also remaining frustratingly vague and lacking in, ironically,…
One of the primary pleasures of the film festival experience is encountering lower-profile new films and new creators free from the burdens of buzz or…
Mo McRae’s directorial debut A Lot of Nothing is — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — a satirical thriller about race relations…
There’s a furious call to revolution at the heart of Mariana Bastos’ Raquel 1:1, a sneaky-smart exploration of institutionalized misogyny masquerading as a vaguely “elevated”…
There’s a piece of advice RuPaul often imparts to the drag queens competing on his hit reality TV show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, that essentially says…
Watching Joële Walinga’s new experimental found-footage documentary Self-Portrait, one is reminded of Abbas Kiarostami’s thoughts upon the Cannes premiere of his 2002 film Ten: “If…