It’s nigh-impossible to discuss the new film In My Room, from Berlin School-affiliated writer/director Ulrich Köhler, without revealing that a third of the way in,…
Serbian director Ognjen Glavonic’s The Load is so minimal and austere that its title – nominally referring to the cargo carried in the truck…
Argentine director Mariano Llinás’s La Flor is a project ten years in the making, and an ode to the sort of movies that filmmakers…
James Longley’s Angels Are Made of Light is an essential document, chronicling several seasons at the Daqiqi Balkhi School in Kabul, Afghanistan. The remnants of conflict…
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s intimate epic of friendship between women, Happy Hour, was my favorite film of 2016, so needless to say Asako I & II,…
Khalik Allah’s new essayistic documentary Black Mother is a deeply moving work of humanistic empathy, intertwining the personal and the political into an aesthetic that…
With Caniba, the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory duo Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor turn their typically assured lens on Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who was deported from Paris…
Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance is one of the most idiosyncratic feature debuts at this year’s NDNF. As with Ambrose’s NDNF-programmed short film Spiral Jetty, the scenario here is…
Carlo de los Santos Arias‘s Cocote moves from a wealthy estate in Santo Domingo to the town of Oviedo, using a personal tale of revenge to examine…
Valérie Massadian’s follow-up to her acclaimed (and still undistributed) 2011 debut Nana is precisely controlled, but without ever resorting to a clinical distance from its…
Araby opens with a teenage boy biking home to take care of his sick younger brother, his parents nowhere in sight. He spends the…
The 47th edition of New Directors/New Films runs from Wednesday, March 28th, to Sunday, April 8th. For our first of two dispatches from the festival, we look at the FIPRESCI…
Bertrand Bonello’s controversial new feature Nocturama, which was passed over by both the Cannes and Venice film festivals, has been pigeonholed as a film that…
Most documentaries live and die by how much they can ‘get out of’ their subjects, which makes Escapes seem relatively low-stakes at first. In chronicling the…
Eduardo Williams’s debut feature, The Human Surge, may well benefit from a second look, but it doesn’t incentivize one. That’s certainly not for lack of ambition:…