Eephus At first, Eephus holds the potential to make one quite sad. For this writer, the effect did not seem intentional and was more…
Scénarios The last image of Jean-Luc Godard’s last film Scénarios is one of the most heartbreaking in his long, storied, notorious, glorious, defining, essential…
All We Imagine As Light “This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night…
Pepe Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air…
Babygirl Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered…
Dahomey Before making her feature film debut with 2019’s Atlantics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop produced a series of poetic short films, all of which…
Hard Truths Six years ago, Mike Leigh produced his first war film, Peterloo, in which domestic unrest in 1819 led British troops to slaughter…
The Seed of the Sacred Fig As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The…
As ever, Fantasia’s Retro lineup offered a wealth of riches this year, from the familiar titles to the utterly unexpected. First and foremost is,…
The Paragon 2024 has been a good year for nostalgia-driven genre cinema so far. Especially with the widespread popularity of films like I Saw…
Cuckoo The first obvious parallel to Tilman Singer’s horror-thriller Cuckoo is The Shining. A family — Luis (Marton Csokas), the patriarch, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer),…
The Code If nothing else, Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker dedicated to understanding how we live with technology, and his greatest strength is a…
Lazaro at Night Medium-length features; a small but consistent troupe of actors in every picture; every scene just another conversation; little-to-no camera movement; and…
Lichens Are the Way As documentaries go, the subject of plant life tends to suffer from a lack of tangible movement. Inertia, ascribed to…
Oh, Canada The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly…
The Invasion Moral judgments in artwork tend to be tinged in shades of gray. This is sometimes expressed by citing Jean Renoir’s unofficial motto…
Of Living Without Illusion A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier…
You Burn Me Matías Piñeiro is best known for loosely adapting Shakespearean texts via small-scaled, interpersonal dramas: Twelfth Night in Viola; Measure for Measure…