Freda, the Creole-language narrative feature debut of actor-director Gessica Généus, is a film that hinges on a dilemma, a fraught existential crisis demanding resolution: whether to…
From Nouvelle Vague filmmakers like Jacques Demy, Jacques Rivette, and Alain Resnais to a contemporary auteur such as Bruno Dumont, or even the more mainstream-friendly…
One of the more consistently interesting young(ish) actors working in international cinema, Louis Garrel has also spent the last decade working at a less interesting…
Director Vincent Le Port co-founded French production company Stank in 2013, through which he has managed to put out a handful of shorts including eerie,…
A film of casually assured artistry and superficial topicality, Noémie Merlant’s feature debut Mi Iubita, Mon Amour is something of an archetypal French festival entry,…
The Holocaust has provided the backdrop for so many films that it’s a rather bracing experience to discover one that handles the subject and setting…
A breathless, even primal, survival thriller, Haider Rashid’s Europa works like gangbusters as a propulsive bit of genre filmmaking, but less so as the empathetic…
“Misfortune departs, grace comes in,” says a villager, as she takes a knife to a Kaffan-leaden woman’s hand. In brightly-lit, glossy handheld, Agata (Celeste Cescutti)…
The titular fracture, between Marina Foïs and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s lesbian couple Julie and Raf, is one of three divides uniting La Fracture’s anxious reality. Physically,…
Jean-Gabriel Périot’s films center around archival footage, crafting stories from multimedia video and grafting them in and out of multiple contexts. Best known for the…
In La Civil’s final shot, Cielo (Arcelia Ramírez) sits on a bench outside her home in Mexico. At the end of a long, fruitless journey…
One of two films debuting in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight by actresses thrust into the spotlight thanks to Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady…
The forest greens and crumbling modernist estates of the Eastern French town of Forbach provide the backdrop for Softie (Petite Nature), a queer coming-of-age story…
He’s Rick James, bitch, and there’s a great new documentary about him by Sacha Jenkins fittingly titled BITCHIN’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James,…
Reminiscent of Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil — another Berlinale competition title that aptly took to task Iran’s capital punishment apparatus — The Ballad…
The Perfect David, the debut feature from Argentinian filmmaker Felipe Gómez Aparicio, opens with a shot of a teenage male working out, his swollen biceps…
Get Out gets the alien abduction treatment in No Running, a half-hearted stab at social commentary that isn’t nearly as fun or as clever as…
The oner is one of the most divisive visual gambits in cinema, so the logical question is what makes for a successful execution of this…
A heavy-handed allegory on the evils of capitalism posing as a contemplative character study, Zhou Ziyang’s Wu Hai wallows in the misery of its protagonist,…
Filmmaker Bing Liu became a notable name quite suddenly in 2018 when his feature debut Minding the Gap premiered at Sundance, going on to be…
Ivy (co-screenwriter Kelly Murtagh), a New Orleans lounge singer wanting to break through to stardom, is also confronting an eating disorder that threatens to upend…