In 2017, former NSA contractor Reality Winner was arrested by the FBI and charged under the Espionage Act for leaking documents pertaining to Russia’s attempts…
Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free is one of those documentaries that is arguably most suitable for a festival like SXSW. That’s not simply because…
Timeliness is one of the great current curses of small-budget genre filmmaking. The impulse to tie a film’s premise to current events or ideology certainly…
At first glance, the plotting of Bradley Grant Smith’s directorial debut feature Our Father would seem to offer plenty of promise. Beta (Baize Buzan) and…
The most interesting aspect of the new comedy Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break is its unwieldy title, an attention-grabber that promises a rollicking good time…
As an inadvertent result of the world’s continued struggle against COVID-19, writer-director Martin Edralin’s Canadian family drama Islands evinces an unexpected form of empathy; with…
A deceptively boilerplate film noir with shades of drab eroticism, Nicole Garcia’s Lovers belies an astonishing sublimation of its cultural and existential milieux. Premiering amidst…
Loosely based on actual events, Farid Bentoumi’s Red Soil follows the efforts of Nour Hamadi (Zita Hanrot) as she attempts to reveal dangerous working conditions and…
Like several films in the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema lineup, Love Affair(s) is a title that was meant to premiere at Cannes 2020, under “The…
Following the travails of a middle-aged woman looking for new purpose after the death of her husband, Ludovic Bergery’s Margaux Hartmann is a gentle, unassuming drama…
Having been bestowed the unusual honor of being selected for a 2020 Cannes Film Festival that never was (slotted into a seemingly new “Comedy” section,…
Parting with the geographical scope and pedagogic address of her past output, Paula Gaitán’s short film/video-installation Se hace camino al andar (literal translation: The Path…
In the summer of the Year without a Summer, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori —…
After five uninterrupted minutes of a camera looking out a train window at the passing greenery — we know it’s a camera looking and not…
Fighter is that rare film able to work within a typically male framework — here, the underdog boxing flick — and translate it to a…
Retreating from the weight of actions into the weightlessness of words, Denis Côté’s latest finds a rambunctious solace in the oratorial. Serving possibly as a…
One of last year’s standouts, Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, traced the trajectory of a writer from his idealistic roots towards a solipsistic cynicism at the…
The COVID pandemic kept Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden out of U.S. cinemas (settling for a virtual-only release) in 2020, but the film’s much-hyped 2019 festival…
We are asked: what of the implications of these encounters? What of the markings left by a history: markings that will elude the act of…
Over the past twelve years, Anocha Suwichakornpong has developed one of the more elusive and protean bodies of work on the festival circuit. Seven years…
Small-town Michigan, as introduced to us in filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist Angelo Madsen Minax’s debut feature North by Current, is a barren tract beset by…