While possessing the backdrop and aesthetics of a social realist drama, the narrative foundation of writer-director Pierre Le Gall’s debut feature Flesh and Fuel takes…
Surely critics will be quick to note that The Beloved (El ser querido) strongly recalls last year’s Sentimental Value, as Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s seventh feature film…
In The Diary of a Chambermaid, Radu Jude returns to one of his favorite subjects: Europe, as a bad joke. This time, the joke comes…
At the 75th edition of Cannes, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022) sparked considerable attention, premiering in Un Certain Regard. This playfully reimagined portrait of…
Pawel Pawlikowski, the immaculate king of grim black-and-white Eastern European cinema, has made us wait eight years for a new film. After the exquisite moral…
As someone whose first airplane experience was a slightly traumatic flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis not long after 9/11, it was a perplexing experience to…
A great way to insult the Circassian men in Butterfly Jam is to say they’re weak. Even worse is to call them a “pussy.” Somewhat…
“There is a hole in the lake where the movies come from” is one of those incredible lines that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp…
Character-driven documentaries place their subjects in a vulnerable position, allowing filmmakers to construct the version of life that will remain attached to them forever. In his…
When Blerta Basholli premiered her debut feature Hive in 2021, it played like a small miracle. The Kosovar Albanian director broke records at Sundance, taking…
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over a decade after the annexation of Crimea, a desire to put the inner…
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, except for Leos Carax’s bizarro musical Annette (2021), the last decade of the Cannes Film Festival has boasted some…
In this dispatch: Every Contact Leaves…
Museums always claim to be the home for lost religious art/anthropological objects — Alain Resnais’ and Chris Marker’s Statues Also Die tackled this patronizing and…
The latest experimental documentary by Lynne Sachs — her 49th film overall — is entirely organized around a formal conceit that simply doesn’t work. That’s…
What better medium for communing with the spirits than film? Sights and sounds of eras since passed, or visions of things unknowable in reality —…
In 2020, Kevin B. Lee and Lého Galibert-Laîné released Bottled Songs 1-4, an epistolary essay film constructed via Lee’s desktop documentary method. Divvied up into…
The Kinshasa-based media group known as Collectif Faire-Part takes its name from their 2018 debut featurette, Faire-Part, about Congolese street performers. Earlier this year the…
In this dispatch: A Date With Shirley…
Back in the ’90s, Ken Jacobs came to the San Francisco Bay Area for a week of programs and seminars. When attending one of the…
Charlie Birns, by his own account, set out to direct a documentary that would re-capture his transcendent experience in an acting class taught by self-styled…