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…
Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box opens with a monotonous thump: the rhythmic sound of a shoe beating against the stained stall of a moving lavatory introduces…
We’re now quite a few years removed from Ari Folman’s critically hyped festival and awards season run for his animated documentary Waltz With Bashir —…
Vika Kirchenbauer effectively established herself on the international experimental scene with her short Untitled Sequence of Gaps, from last year, an intriguing rumination on varieties of light…
Zhang Yimou’s One Second was originally scheduled to premiere at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, but was pulled at the last, ahem, second for what…
Laurent Cantet stumbles badly with Arthur Rambo, a topical provocation on cancel culture and the evils of social media that feels both toothless and weirdly…
Shot on location in a small town on the border between Brazil & Argentina, writer/director Agustina San Martín’s To Kill the Beast occupies a woozy,…
At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, Sébastien Pilote’s traditional treatment of Louis Hemon’s Maria Chapdelaine is a headline for all the…
There’s nothing particularly novel about Oleg Sentsov’s Rhino, a rise-and-fall gangster narrative about a Ukrainian tough guy who carves a bloody swath through his enemies…
To make an effective political film, one frequently turns to documentary as the best medium for truth; it’s hard to deny in exemplars of the…
The Judith Butler quote (from Dispossession) that opens Jun Li’s Drifting serves as a neat entry point: “Such bodies both perform the conditions of life…
One of the central tensions in cinema is that of authenticity: The inherent power of this medium comes from its depiction of images and experiences…
Stanley Kwan has never achieved the same level of critical renown here in America as his countryman Wong Kar-wai, which seems most certainly in large…
Tracing Her Shadow, the third feature by Song Pengfei (whose films are credited to just his given name), deals with a relatively little-known historical tragedy:…
The collective known as the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers – who have two of their films at this year’s CineCina Film Festival – accounts for,…
As an authentic example of guerilla filmmaking (with its roots in independent rebellion, rather than serving as an Escape From Tomorrow-esque marketing ploy), Sad Film…