A frontier western without any ontologically stable sense of indigeneity or the homestead, Pablo Aparo’s The Victors is a film that resists the easy binaries…
Like his previous feature, which opens with a 1988 Coca-Cola ad, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon begins with another vintage commercial — or, at least, a…
The critical concept of intersectionality, like “wokeness” or “critical race theory,” has been evacuated of its actual meaning by bad-faith bloggers and the conservative commentariat.…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die is the Palestinian filmmaker and archivist’s cinematic “answer” to the pioneering Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s invitation to collaborate,…
The main narrative engine, if there’s any to speak of, in Serra’s only other documentary, Afternoons of Solitude, was about trapping its subject in three…
In this excerpt: Donkey Princess…
Few worlds in cinema are as unmistakable as those of Chilean visual-art virtuosos Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, whose astonishing craft is matched by the…
Representation does not equal inclusion. With ostensibly good intentions and plenty of compassion, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s attempt at telling the story of refugee…
The inline skate is a useful metaphor for the life of Alex (Ani Mesa-Perez), the young woman on the cusp of adulthood in Erin Vassilopoulos’…
The aesthetics of liminality, arising from online images and storytelling revolving around emptied public spaces and mediated encounters with the uncanny, have lately penetrated cinema.…
In his most recent short The Wind, One Brilliant Day, Ben Rivers takes on a poem-in-translation by the Spanish modernismo writer Antonio Machado, né Antonio…
In this dispatch: Unholy Night…
For introverts and the unaccomplished, the greatest threat looming over every family gathering isn’t the unlikely prospect of mass violence, but an all too conscious…
It’s all too easy to feel at home in Casey Walker’s Home Bodies. Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho) have lived all their days in…
Akira Nagai’s Suzuki=Bakudan is a police procedural in which nearly every consequential movement begins with a man sitting at a table. Tagosaku Suzuki (Jiro Sato),…
Canadian perversion has always held a firm grip on our self-narrativization, the violent alienation of our national identities always sought after in reconciliation. Most often,…
There is something about horror maestro Takashi Shimizu’s The Mouths that feels as foundational as myth. The film’s premise is simple enough: a group of university-aged…
In this dispatch: Colony, Someone\’s…
At best, Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Someone’s Daughter can be described as well-intentioned. Critically, however, it is existentially foolhardy and morally naive. Carrying a juvenile sort…
In Mark H. Rapaport’s Godhead, the world would seem to start and end between the walls of the church. In fact, this specific church commands…