Cannes seems to have settled into a kind of violent habit: slotting a promising film by a female auteur into its tail end. This year’s…
In the 1960s, the sociologist duo Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss noticed a phenomenon quite common in healthcare. What they call “a ritual…
A presupposition of Bruno Dumont’s cinema is that the bare world into which we enter is circumscribed by moral order. This should not be confused…
A noted director of shorts, Greek filmmaker Konstantina Kotzamani makes her feature debut with Titanic Ocean, a purposefully opaque but frustratingly vague coming-of-age story that attempts to…
This past January saw the passing of Ulyana Semyonova, the Latvian basketball great who twice won Olympic gold for the USSR and whose seven-foot frame…
Shana, Lila Pinell’s debut narrative feature, centers on a character who is immediately compelling, yet whose complexities and internal contradictions unspool gradually throughout the film’s…
Talk of generations forgotten is typically regarded as historical fact, whereas dreams about the desiccated self are frequently dismissed as melodramatic outings a dime a…
It would be naïve to assume a documentary featuring a revolutionary subject would de facto pursue fidelity with the revolution. No artistic mandate exists requiring…
The profane and the sacred prove fairly close in Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples to Heaven. One need look no further than the premise of the…
Yukiko Sode’s slice-of-life epic All the Lovers in the Night clocks in at just under two and a half hours, but feels far more alive…
Watching La Perra, the new film from Dominga Sotomayor, one may be reminded of those pet adoption bumper stickers that read “who rescued who?” In…
The Quran states that “whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity.” The Station, the debut feature from Yemeni…
For the first time in his feature career, Cristian Mungiu has shifted his critical gaze from Romania to its western neighbors. A Cannes luminary par…
As landmark movies go, Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut Freedom could hardly have been less fitting. A documentary/fiction hybrid chronicling one day in the life of…
The very best instances of allegory are those that allow themselves to be completely ignored. Too often, an artist only pretends to be interested in…
Toward the beginning of Too Many Beasts, aging farmer Raoul Brun (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) intentionally runs over several large boars, packs their bodies in the trunk…
Long before Russia commenced its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the winter of 2022, preeminent cineast Andrey Zvyagintsev already saw dark clouds gathering over his…
Sometimes the first shot of a film tells you enough to know you’re in the hands of a great director. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown —…
Karim Lakzadeh seems to be someone who takes his competition titles very seriously. His latest film, Living Twice, Dying Thrice (LTDT from now on), premiering…
Out of the diamond-blue depths of the night sky over southern France, Jean Moulin parachutes down. By the time the film opens in 1943, the…
Harmony Korine gleefully threw genre cinema in the deep fryer with the hitman miasma of Aggro Dr1ft (2023). This year, Nicolas Winding Refn took it…