In Miranda Pennell’s latest essay film, the filmmaker carefully plaits a number of seemingly distinct cultural and historical strands, and in so doing, offers a…
In Michael Salerno’s The Masturbator’s Heart, death is an unshakeable temptation so vivid it becomes an obligation. It’s a remedy, a return to total neutrality.…
“The homosexual subject group,” writes Guy Hocquenghem, “knows that civilization alone is mortal.” Written in 1973, prior to the AIDS epidemic, Hocquenghem located the threat…
It’s always a pleasure to find genuinely weird horror movies at a film festival, the kind too offbeat or otherwise too uncommercial to garner attention…
Gloria Gaynor’s 1979 classic disco track “I Will Survive,” written and produced by Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren, boasts as its nominal subject a woman’s…
The motley lineups of the Tribeca Film Festival often may not deliver the riches of more prestigious festivals, but they do provide space to expand…
With its uninviting snowbound setting, drab wood-paneled roadside motels and bars, and sudden explosions of gangland violence, there is a decidedly Fargo-like shape to Rod…
Anna Roller’s directorial debut, Dead Girls Dancing, boasts a quite familiar plot, following three German high schoolers who embark on a road trip throughout Italy…
Priest, politician, resistance fighter, and social worker Abbé Pierre remains one of France’s most popular figures, best known for founding Emmaus, a charity movement with…
In many respects, each of the works by Wang Bing at Cannes this year exemplify the now reigning axes of Wang’s interests and style. Youth…
A deceptive airiness courses through No Love Lost, the sophomore feature from Erwan Le Duc — which follows his equally quaint and whimsical The Bare…
Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani) is a storm that is hard to contain: though pure, she’s capable of so much darkness. And she’s six years old. Raised…
Two years ago, French director Catherine Corsini was in Cannes’ Competition with The Divide, a film that used the deteriorating marriage of two well-heeled Parisian…
Though recent Palme d’Or wins for Parasite and Titane might point to a changing landscape, Cannes has never been a particularly genre-friendly festival. Most selections…
A delicate and bittersweet queer coming-of-age film, A Song Sung Blue is also, unfortunately, weighed down by all the predictable beats that befall its bildungsroman…
Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s 2020 documentary film Petit Samedi profiled her own family, paying particular attention to her brother and his drug addiction. Her debut…
It’s been five years since Djon Africa, the last feature from co-directors João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis. That film — about a Cape Verdean…
Trần Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu charts a romance between gourmet chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoit Magimel) and his cook, Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), in late 18th-century France.…
A plaintive, largely melancholic coming-of-age story, writer-director-editor Anthony Shim documents his childhood as a Korean immigrant in 1990s Canada in the intermittently cloying but mostly…
One of the more delightful, long-running series in contemporary cinema is Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker films, wherein actor Lee Kang-sheng — dressed in flowing red Buddhist…
It’s easy to see into the future. All one has to do is see the present and ask what would happen if we accepted the…