French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis has been working on a film about Thelonious Monk for more than a decade. Rewind and Play is not that movie.…
From its title alone, Gastón Solnicki’s latest film suggests that it avoids grand statements, instead choosing to offer an assemblage of conceptual lagniappes, ideational odds…
James Benning’s The United States of America (2022) opens with a shot of Heron Bay, Alabama. With its muted landscape and dull blue sky, the…
In many respects, Jet Lag feels like a recognizable follow-up to Chinese director Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s Tiger Award-winning The Cloud in Her Room. There’s black-and-white…
“Swimming in lakes and ponds one also drinks out of, and finding that everything that one sees is intimately linked to one’s body movements, constituted…
Sable Island, the crescent-shaped sandbar located in the North Atlantic Ocean, is the site of Jacquelyn Mills’ debut feature film Geographies of Solitude. It’s an…
Despite being active since 1990 and directing a dozen or so films of various lengths and in various formats, it wasn’t until around the release…
Framing Agnes — the second feature-length documentary directed by Chase Joynt, who also co-directed No Ordinary Man (2020) — lays the vast bulk of its…
Perhaps because artists are so often misfits, unable to easily fit in to the normal currents of society, the slacker remains one of cinema’s enduring…
There’s always an argument to be made over how to evaluate “discovering” an artistic voice, over whether it should come within the consideration of a…
Despite its generic-seeming title, Tania Anderson’s directorial debut The Mission focuses on a very specific form of religious work: the two-year missions to Finland, undertaken…
Actor Jesse Eisenberg seems to be playing right into his on-screen persona as an insufferable narcissist with his feature directing debut When You Finish Saving…
Documenting the most downloaded phone app of all time is a daunting task. Director Shalini Kantayya is aware of such a prospect; right at the…
Filmmaker Lucy Walker’s new documentary Bring Your Own Brigade is a large, unwieldy film, bursting at the seams with ideas. While occasionally unfocused, Walker deftly…
From the outside, Peter Nicks’ documentaries follow in the path of Frederick Wiseman’s institutional portraits. Nicks’s first, second, and third films (The Waiting Room, The Force, Homeroom) correspond…
A recent episode of Saturday Night Live included the latest iteration of a recurring sketch, “The Dionne Warwick Talk Show,” which parodies Warwick’s latter-day pop-culture presence as…
It seems fair to suggest that The Forgotten Ones is a film for the Western Jews, communities of the diaspora, a collective lost to the Zionist campaign…
In a late scene in Chameleon Street, Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s 1990 film, an astonishingly brilliant and wickedly comedic interrogation of American racism’s corrosive effects…
“I’m sorry if I doubted your good heart / Things always seem to end before they start.” A ruefully apologetic Lou Reed sings these words…
In Ste. Anne, Rhayne Vermette strives to imbue narrative filmmaking with as much tangible texture as possible, even if that means freely disrupting said narrative…
How does one condense over five decades of history into the limited duration of two hours? By making a hacky, talking-head documentary, obviously. But before…