In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels…
In the opening scene of Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, the film introduces one of its two heroines in a hospital clinic: a young…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary…
In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First…
Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in…
Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s…
In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the…
First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever,…
Only a few minutes into his 100,000,000,000,000, 48-year-old French filmmaker Virgil Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis) presents to viewers a gang of four young escorts…
Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of…
The most emotionally and spiritually invigorating faith-based films rely not on proselytization or condemnation, but on abstraction. Their dramatic force comes from their characters’…
Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age…
Those who have seen the Zürcher twins’ other works, The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider, may have felt a tension…
In the last 10 or 15 years, the micro-universe that we call the experimental film world has made a decisive shift toward a form…
Despite his increasing arthouse acclaim, Radu Jude has never been associated with a distinct stylistic stamp; indeed, he has long flitted between various formalist…
Death Will Come, German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s latest feature (and first French-language production), follows a contract killer, Tez (Sophie Veerbeck), who is hired by…
For a certain type of documentary, intimate access to one’s subject is a double-edged sword. Leila Amini’s debut film is a close look at…