Bikechess is a strange name for Assel Aushakimova’s latest work. The scene that gives the Kazakh film its name comes in the beginning, with the…
Don Hardy’s career as a documentary filmmaker has spanned an eclectic range of themes that are bound, in some way, by an interest in mystery,…
To the uninitiated, techno music might feel forbiddingly sterile, lacking the warmth of familiar analog instruments or the collaborative dynamic of bandmates, songwriters, and producers.…
The playful vignettes of various cheesemongers, makers, and even competition judges in Ian Cheney’s Shelf Life are much like the dairy product itself — each…
Writer-director Qiu Yang’s first feature film, Some Rain Must Fall, begins during monsoon season. Cai (Yu Aier) is in the midst of finalizing her divorce…
Steady hums and inverted camerawork in the early moments of Justin Anderson’s psychological drama Swimming Home are strategies of disorientation, signaling its intent to unmoor…
Following Red Rocket in 2021, Anora marks Sean Baker’s second straight feature in competition at Cannes, and this one comes with reports of packed screenings…
The fraternal duo of Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu have been making films together for around 25 years. An early featurette of theirs, Roland’s Pass (2000),…
Once upon a time, there were frightened people. They were so frightened that their imagination escaped,” says a soothing, soft, and elderly feminine voice. The…
In Retreat, the debut feature from Iranian-born Ladhaki director Maisam Ali, is the sort of film one hates to be negative about. It’s made on…
Writing on Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Bloody Oranges back in 2022, InRO’s Matt Lynch described it as a “glib little attempt at satirizing The Way We Live…
In Western countries, the dailiness in those “lesser developed” ones has long been abstracted by a dearth of artistic and cultural diffusion from one to…
Moral judgments in artwork tend to be tinged in shades of gray. This is sometimes expressed by citing Jean Renoir’s unofficial motto that “everyone has…
The Shameless feels very much like an art-sploitation entry from the mid-’90s, when directors thought that a frank depiction of lesbian desire, in and of…
Cordoned to a cultural temperament that favors realism, based-on-true-stories, and the animated mythologies of men and women who have walked among us, the biopic has…
The depiction of grief in films is as variable as film form. It can be outwardly melodramatic like in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993),…
When first introduced at the beginning of Jonás Trueba’s The Other Way Around, a couple, Ale (Itsaso Ariana) and Alex (Vito Sanz), have already decided…
Longtime Tsai fans might recall that he officially retired from making feature films back in 2013. He must’ve been in some kind of a mood,…
One of the unique features of Emilia Beatriz’s new film barrunto is the omnipresence of sur- and subtitles, translating between Spanish and English, differentiating between…
Critic Alex Fields has called Joost Rekveld’s films “glimpses into secret patterns that underlie our physical reality.” While abstracted images engineered from analog computers are…
Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night is a film of patterns — in its geography, which functions as both an exploration of a library and…