Promotional materials for Audrey Estrougo’s Suprême NTM biopic — imaginatively titled Suprêmes — notes La Haine, Les Misérables, and Straight Outta Compton as reference points…
What’s more hip than mimicking the particular, diffuse, long-take formalism favored by many of the most acclaimed filmmakers in Asia today? How about having your…
It’s a shame that The Braves didn’t keep its French title Entre Les Vagues (Between the Waves) for its worldwide release. Between the Waves is…
Bonne mère, the second feature from actress and writer-director Hafsia Herzi, locates itself in the city of Marseille. Once known for its wealth and grandeur,…
At first glance, Aleksey German, Jr.’s House Arrest is a satire aimed squarely at Russian state repression and censorship. David (Merab Ninidze), a University professor,…
Yohan Manca’s La Traviata, My Brothers and I presents a side of Italy rarely seen in modern cinema, one that lies just beyond the picturesque…
Anna Podskalská’s Red Shoes presents a popular and insidious trend within contemporary animated cinema at the moment, with its animation style aping the oil-painting-on-canvas approach taken with…
It feels churlish to criticize Shlomi Elkabetz’s Black Notebooks project, a deeply personal documentary that’s part travelogue, part diary entry, and part remembrance for his deceased sister, the…
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…