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, of…
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 the…
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), his…
The Code If nothing else, Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker dedicated to understanding how we live with technology, and his greatest strength is a willingness…
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 beguiling,…
Lichens Are the Way As documentaries go, the subject of plant life tends to suffer from a lack of tangible movement. Inertia, ascribed to the…
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 in-joke…
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 that…
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 in…
The Book of Solutions Michel Gondry feels like an artist from another time, even if that time wasn’t very long ago. The only movie he…
In one way, horror fans have a lot to be happy about. Over the past decade, the genre has broken out of its “midnight movie”…
Steppenwolf Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has directed 15 films in the last 12 years, a breakneck pace to rival even Hong Sang-soo. Not many seem…
Dear Kaita Ablaze France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an…
Head South For as long as the cinematic form has existed, it has embraced nostalgia, that cultural drug which oversees virtually every socio-political framework known…
Songs of Earth On November 14, 2023, this year, the United States federal government released the National Climate Assessment, the latest report comprehensively spelling out…
When critic Darren Hughes and filmmaker Paul Harrill founded The Public Cinema in 2015, their goal was to bring important works of world cinema and…
Light Matter’s fourth 2023 program is titled “Blurred Lines.” Though lines literal and figurative blur within many of the constituent films, the title refers more…
Now in its third consecutive year, the Light Matter Festival has become a major East Coast showcase for experimental film and video, presenting a diversity…
One of the pleasures of encountering experimental film and video in a festival setting is the chance to get a survey, the lay of the…
Maestro When the 2018 remake of old Hollywood standby A Star is Born dropped, it marked the culmination of over a decade’s worth of effort…