The Last Word from Your Editor, Sam C. Mac: With the 2010s officially over, the time seems right for another departure: after 12 years (with a small break in the middle), I’m stepping down as this site’s Editor-in-Chief, to be succeeded by co-founder (and unapologetic…
It’s been a year of confrontation at the movies, as the domestic and international conflicts of the past several years have reached varying degrees of terminus, seemingly (but just as likely not). Battles in the world between tradition and (r)evolution, in all the myriad…
We’ve decided to do something a little different this year for our 2019 (so far) lists; instead of a formal poll, were using this as an occasion to plug some of the most positive stuff that we’ve written this year, with just a few…
An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo’s bleak epic of lives spent swimming upstream in the modern economic conditions of China, is an exacting depiction of depression. Even without knowing the circumstances behind the film (its director took his own life last October), an unrelenting…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it has to be said, looks as if it may be one of the strongest slates since our site first started covering the fest, a full 10 years ago. There are a number of reasons why this could be: As…
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 Discovery Prize winner at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival (Ava); the late Chinese director Hu Bo’s sole film, a…
