An undeniably audacious film, Ann Oren’s Objet a is also actively irksome. At the risk of coming across as condescending, this is the sort of…
In this dispatch: The Riverbank, Hanabi…
The northern city of Recife, Brazil, enjoyed something of a renaissance last year with the success of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Garnering more…
“Four years have passed since the accident. You feel that your relationship to radioactive contamination is changing,” intones the narrator near the beginning of Ana…
Andreas Fontana’s 2021 film Azor told the story of Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship through the lens of a ground-level functionary, observing how unremarkable bankers and…
It’s a common refrain that it takes an outsider filmmaker to capture the truth of a place. An influx of Germans like Billy Wilder and…
Georgian filmmaker Uta Beria’s Tear Gas opens on a series of still images depicting people in migration, which eventually bleeds into the moving image as…
Schematically, one could divide Hong Sang-soo’s oeuvre into two sets of films: on the one hand, those where the structural play with narrative is upfront…
Who could forget that scene in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s character narrates what life is like in prison for “wiseguys”? As his cellmates slice garlic…
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.…
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…