The names of the two main characters in Sara Summa’s debut feature appear rather ambiguously on the screen. Summa’s opening titles are handwritten in partial…
Michel Gondry feels like an artist from another time, even if that time wasn’t very long ago. The only movie he directed with any real…
In Mona Achache’s Little Girl Blue, actress Marion Cotillard first appears as herself. As Achache gives her a wig, brown-colored contacts, perfume, a cherished necklace,…
There’s a mystery at the heart of writer/director Iris Kaltenbäck’s debut feature film The Rapture, but unlike the reams of true-crime documentaries and adjacent media…
Death hangs over the first moments of The Temple Woods Gang, the riveting seventh feature from French-Algerian filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaimëche. Grizzled military retiree Pons (Régis…
“Not a day elapsed which did not bring us news of the decease of some acquaintance. Then, as the fatality increased, we learned to expect…
The last decade has seen disillusionment and negativity about feature filmmaking expand from the grumblings of enthusiasts to a near-universal consensus that they’re not making…
yours, is an anthology piece commissioned by Kunstencentrum Nona (Nona Arts Center) to pay tribute to Chantal Akerman — a titan of durational and feminist…
Gábor Reisz’s latest film is Hungarian through and through, but despite that, it feels very much like a sanded-down Romanian one. In fact, some of…
Given the current, extremely complicated relationship between Hong Kong and China, it’s perhaps surprising that Choy Ji’s film (his debut feature) Borrowed Time made it…
Speculative fiction tends to valorize the unreality of utopianism more than the concreteness of dystopian realism, and perhaps intuitively so: in the act of speculating,…
The spanning dramaturgy of an ensemble piece is often a precarious balancing act, determined by the intentions of a writer who seeks to utilize the…
The tragic history of the Nakba — the Israeli occupation — and the resulting diaspora have led to a distinctive voice among Palestinian experimental filmmakers.…
Like many films gunning to establish an immediately serious tone, Angga Dwimas Sasongko’s 13 Bombs begins with sobering news reports. One newscaster outlines Indonesia’s slow…
The syntactically redundant title of Tomonari Nishikawa’s latest film provides a subtle hint as to what the filmmaker is up to. If one watches the…
The interaction between documenting the act of filmmaking and the final film as a meaning-making document for the filmmaker, subject, and spectator is a staple…
France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary…
The subject of the poets and poetry of Hong Kong is a natural for Ann Hui, always the most literarily inclined of the great directors…
Pablo Marín’s cinema can be deceptively simple and deceptively complex. Having worked exclusively on 8 and 16mm celluloid, the Argentinian filmmaker has gravitated, as with…
Imagine Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter — a devastating, years-long descent of a small town in the aftermath of a communal tragedy that traces grief…
For the past several years, Leonardo Pirondi has created a fascinating body of experimental works that play with fictional documentary frameworks to produce complex layers…