Anyone who has made as many masterpieces as the French experimental director Jean-Claude Rousseau deserves his occasional oddities and indulgences, but his new 10-minute short…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is our great purveyor of modern ennui, a chronicler of creeping existential dread as the world we have created now threatens to engulf…
Chop wood, carry water. The well is running dry for the titular noise punk band of Ken’ichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz. Their shows in their hometown…
In Japan, the term jidaigeki — literally translating to “period drama” — is typically ascribed to a genre of samurai film, most commonly set during…
Daihachi Yoshida’s black-and-white character study Teki Cometh follows the daily routines and ruminations of retired French literature professor Gisuke Watanabe (Kyôzô Nagatsuka). Divided into four…
A fabulistic streak tints the proceedings of The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard, David Verbeek’s ninth feature, with a sheen of greyscale anonymity that…
In this gluttonous age of streaming, where art of all forms is cannibalized by the film industry in pursuit of content, the more particular art…
Director Suzannah Herbert’s documentary Natchez, which counts Sam Pollard among its executive producers and won this year’s Documentary Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival, captures…
Married directorial pair Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have consistently risked being hit by the type of criticism that considers “postmodernism” a dirty word. Many…
The author Hunter S. Thompson is widely credited with founding the “Gonzo journalism” movement, which is informally defined as incorporating subjective language and satire into…
“Hope is the dream of those who are awake,” muses Nélida (Soledad Pelayo) to her daughter, Elisa (Martina Passeggi), in a display of gentle and…
Movies about the music industry can be a tough pitch. Selling a superstar artist as just that demands either the savviest ear for commercially viable…
“You sound cool talking out your ass,” Bruce (Anthony Oberbeck) quips to his best friend and roommate, Simon (newcomer Tristan Turner), a struggling filmmaker. In…
There’s much to like about Victoria Franco’s Twelve Moons, a serious-minded drama about loss and addiction that avoids easy platitudes and simplistic moralizing. That is, until…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
Immersing yourself in a new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is akin to reluctantly catching up with an old friend. As of late, there’s…
No matter how common the surroundings or how ordinary the story may be, a Christian Petzold film always catches the viewer by surprise. His films…
In the face of ongoing, ever-intensifying genocide, nuance is arguably out of order, and so agit-prop wisdom becomes a creative’s necessary juice. But for Israeli…
“I’ve got to start something,” Nino, the eponymous protagonist of Pauline Loquès’ feature debut, announces early in the film to his mother at the kitchen…
Peak Everything (or Amour Apocalypse, its easily translatable French title) is only Anne Émond’s second film to premiere internationally, following Our Loved Ones — easily…
In Sentimental Value, there’s a scene where the veteran filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, explains to his newly discovered lead actress, Rachel Kemp,…