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…
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…
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…