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,…
Canadian animator Félix Dufour-Laperrière has described his third and most ambitious feature, film Death Does Not Exist, as a tonal experiment, dropping characters possessed with…
To the avid film festival observer, the gargantuan, Odyssean works of Filipino director Lav Diaz competing or winning an award is something of a staple.…
There is no creation without destruction, no light without darkness. When the great colonial powers (great as in imposing, not as in good) of centuries…
Same-sex marriage was legalized in France in 2013, one of many countries to enshrine this right as law in the 2010s as the marriage equality…
There’s a remarkable kind of alchemy at work in Hubert Charuel’s Meteors, an addiction story that transcends the typically staid strictures of the genre to…
Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under…
Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk seems likely to be the most important film to screen at the 2025…
There are two kinds of cinephile: those who hear a movie described as “Black Swan on ice” and sneer, noses upturned, their one-line, one-and-a-half star…
In the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, a Kyiv-based auditorium turns into an ad hoc military classroom. Civilians take turns…
One day, noticing an influx of dust into their apartment due to some construction outside, a person known only as an “academic ladyboy” (as they…
Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done begins with a cryptic series of images; pitch-black night, a pile of discarded clothing, closeups of various faces, impassive…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
A white person adrift in an “exotic” land, losing themselves in order to find themselves in the perceived primitiveness, peculiarity, or freedom of their strange…
The titular girl of The Girl in the Snow, director Louise Hémon’s debut feature, appears repeatedly as a dark silhouette. Clad in a black cloak…
Biblical scholars and theologians use “antediluvian” to describe the world of Genesis between the fall from Eden and the flood. Literally meaning “before the flood,”…
One of the more welcome upsets in recent cinema history occurred in 2022, when Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles unseated…
Kaori Oda’s Underground is a film built around the meanings of its title, but it’s also apparently built up to 83 minutes out of reused…
“The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny,…
The middle class context of Kostis Charamountanis’ Kyuka: Before Summer’s End gives its story of a languid, European summer vacation a refreshingly dressed-down feel. Like…