Antoinetta Angelidi’s filmography is composed of five films across five decades, stretching back to Idées Fixes/Dies Irae in 1977. Over the subsequent half century, Greece’s…
In his new short film, Rainer Kohlberger proposes the titular electric kiss as an ultimate pleasure, a literal sum of the neural impulses that produce…
The recent construction of the $217 million Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, confirmed by Hindu mythology as Shri Ram’s birthplace in India, and the ruling right-wing…
For as long as the cinematic form has existed, it has embraced nostalgia, that cultural drug which oversees virtually every socio-political framework known to modern…
The rare Shinya Tsukamoto film to not star the director himself, Shadow of Fire is his third consecutive period piece, following Fires on the Plain…
In his books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze draws a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image is concerned with linear…
Fabio D’Orta’s The Complex Forms opens with a long pan over a burning car, set to an audacious classical piece, that slowly flips 180 degrees…
Pete Ohs’ amiably idiosyncratic new feature Love and Work is set in a future where jobs are illegal. It begins with Diane (Stephanie Hunt, also…
What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection for…
The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of realism.…
The worst thing a film — or any other form of art — can do is work too hard to be about something. This is…
Desire Lines is a hybrid film that understands the themes it wants to address, but struggles to find the formal means. Part conventional talking heads…
With its title referring to the scar left behind by a suicidal person who hesitates and fails to deliver a mortal wound, Selman Nacar’s Hesitation…
“Camels are adored by their jockeys,” a Bedouin camel herder sings out to the snow-covered desert at the beginning of Abu Bakr Shawky’s Hajjan. Inside…
Symbols are like Alfred Hitchcock’s (flawed) definition of drama — “life with the dull bits cut out.” Their universal appeal derives from prioritizing a familiar…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to the…
There’s no denying the contemporary trend to “narrativize” otherwise fact-based documentaries, filmmakers shaping reams of footage into something resembling the three-act structure of the average…
One of the most discussed Estonian films of the year, Dark Paradise is a strange beast from one of the country’s most promising and rising…
Free Solo, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s 2018 documentary, was a visually stunning document of a truly impressive feat: Alex Honnold climbing the entirety…
When critic Darren Hughes and filmmaker Paul Harrill founded The Public Cinema in 2015, their goal was to bring important works of world cinema and…
Until 2021, France did not have a set legal age of consent. Then Vanessa Springora wrote Le Consentement in 2020, an autobiographical memoir about her…