Shinichiro Ueda’s debut feature One Cut of the Dead was a sensation both in Japan and abroad when it came out a few years ago.…
Roar begins with a vertiginously disorienting prologue, as a manic handheld camera frantically searches a room before pushing into an extreme close-up of a frightened,…
I think it’s safe to say that Nobuhiko Obayashi no longer requires an introduction. For that we owe the Japan Cuts team a debt of…
The title of Myanmar-born, Taiwan-based Midi Z’s fourth fiction feature, The Road to Mandalay, conjures Kipling-esque Orientalist visions of the far east. But this starkly rendered yet…
If there is only one trait which distinguishes Bird Island from other contemporary documentaries, it is of the singular way in which the directorial duo…
Director Luca Ferri introduces us to Bianca Dolce Miele, the subject of his new film The House of Love, in conspicuous fashion. She’s seated, directly…
Winner of the GWFF Best First Feature award at the 2020 Berlinale, Camilo Restrepo’s Los Conductos is one of the more auspicious feature directing debuts…
The least that can be said of Korean director Yoon Sung-hyun is that he takes his time, with ten years separating the filmmaker’s debut coming-of-age…
Using the infamous Lorraine, France coal miner strike of 1995 as a launchpad for his debut feature, Strike or Die director Jonathan Rescigno explores various…
Winnipeg madman Guy Maddin is back with another kooky, kitschy post-modern melodrama, this one called Stump the Guesser. It’s a 20 minute short that finds…
Within this year’s Panorama Dokumente section at Berlin, Patric Chiha’s If It Were Love stands as one of the festival’s more esoteric, and in many…
A spectral trilogy concludes under refracted conditions in Christian Petzold’s diagnostic landscape of 20th Century anxieties, which actualizes the magical realist gestures methodically peppered throughout…
Orphea is as scattershot a film as one would expect from the unlikely artistic duo of Alexander Kluge and Khavn De La Cruz. The two…
40 years after his film Grand Opera debuted as part of the Berlinale lineup, legendary avant-garde filmmaker James Benning returns with a personal, strangely hypnotic…
Another portrait of trauma, Nora Fingesheidt’s debut feature revolves around the social condition indicated by its title: Systemsprenger, or System Crasher. The film follows problem…
Shot between August 2016 and January 2017 in the Dom Pedro Hotel in the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazilian filmmaker Maíra Bühler’s Let it Burn is…
When we open our eyes, what is it that we first see? There’s inanimate objects that we can recognize, but that requires several steps beyond…
The Neighboring Sounds festival booklet describes Private Fiction as Argentinean filmmaker Andres Di Tella charting a turbulent 20th Century romance through archival photos and letters from his parents,…
David Zonana’s Workforce possesses lofty artistic ambitions for a debut: it apes Bresson rather liberally, utilizing somber diegetic music cues, mostly non-professional actors, a relatively…
Marcelo Gomes’ Waiting for the Carnival unfolds in the village of Toritama, the self-proclaimed “capital of jeans,” in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Though it…
Miguel Hilari’s Compania is a small, modest gem of a film, a poetic evocation of mystical and religious ceremonies juxtaposed with the natural beauty of the agrarian…