The most prolific filmmaker in the Baltics has returned. Šarūnas Bartas, the director behind The House and Peace to Us in Our Dreams, has been…
Wavelengths 2: Into the Blue, more than either of the other 2025 shorts programs or the features, exemplifies experimental film programming’s recent trend toward documentary,…
In the opening scenes of Cai Shangjun’s The Sun Rises on Us All, a woman in her mid-30s, Meiyun (Xin Zhilei), is getting an ultrasound.…
“I wonder if it’s like being inside an aquarium,” remarks sixteen-year-old Choo Xin Yu (Ranice Tay) as she sits for her Ordinary Level examinations. Facing…
Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke is a delight, a playful formalist in a sea of self-serious festival auteurs. But because comedy is often viewed askance by…
Tasha Hubbard’s debut fiction work is a clear-eyed, frustrating compound of incomplete scenes and rounded emotional resonance, where characters speak in terms defined either by…
In addition to being the leading auteur working in the Inuktitut language, director Zacharias Kunuk has been a standard bearer for Indigenous cinema more generally…
Content is the new oil. In Babystar, the debut feature from German director Joscha Bongard, the 16-year-old Luca (Maja Bons) is the center of both…
Aki is a film of abundance. The world it envisions and celebrates is lifegiving and beautiful. Most of Aki, a title that translates from Anishinaabemowin…
One could argue that it speaks to the humanistic timelessness of The Bicycle Thieves that it just keeps getting remade, with the circumstances adapted to…
The first of this year’s Wavelengths short film programs begins, appropriately enough, with Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, a 2016 work by Tomonari…
Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts with his…
Just as the prospect of taking root in one place imposes an uneasiness on the mind, so too does relocation prompt a restlessness of the…
With Short Summer, writer/director Nastia Korkia has created an exquisite, evocative portrait of a rapidly disintegrating world told almost entirely through the eyes of a child.…
The grist mill of capitalism has no shortage of critics today, incisive policymakers and inane pedants alike who know too well the anonymous and alienated…
Russian luminary Alexander Sokurov delivers another curveball. Following Fairytale, his 2022 animated feature about notorious leaders of the 20th century languishing in purgatory, Sokurov offers…
Filmmaker, artist, and animator Virgilio Villoresi’s first feature, Orfeo, made after years of directing short films, advertisements, and music videos, is a whimsical, finely crafted…
Aquatic and crispy shades of green, ochre, and blue dominate Park Sye-young’s apocalyptic The Fin. The title serves a double-entendre, referring not only to the…
The canary, a songbird of the finch family, occupies an eminent place in avian symbolism, not least for its melodious birdsong, which in turn underscores…
Unlike the big three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), Locarno does not traditionally feel an obligation to elevate domestic product into its competition.…
Tamara Stepanyan’s film In the Land of Arto begins with a service interruption that functions as a metaphor. Céline (Camille Cottin) is traveling by train…