In the early 1990s, Derek Jarman’s career was at a crucial inflection point. The BBC was starting to fund feature films, and Derek’s angry, queer…
Ted Fendt’s films have always had a proclivity for the esoteric; analog film stocks, long takes, conversation amongst intellectuals, 20th-century novels. Yet they remain primarily…
My Undesirable Friends: Part 2 – Exile picks up right where Par 1 – Last Air in Moscow left off: Russia is a little over…
Fourteen years ago, Dan Sallitt burst into the indie film scene with his transgressive, funny, and ultimately sweet, The Unspeakable Act. It wasn’t Sallitt’s first…
Ever-present on those pesky “most disturbing movies” lists, Begotten almost became a victim of its own success. The film’s demiurge, God Killing Himself, adorns the…
Parsing the cinema’s relation to sound, Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “…the sound as well as visual elements of the image enter into internal relations which…
You’d think it would be impossible to create a new vision of death and the afterlife after more than a century of cinematic depictions. A…
The image of a lone warrior holding a child is baked into cinema’s fabric. From Lone Wolf and Cub to Hard Boiled, it’s iconography that…
I recently had the good fortune to screen Macedonian writer-director Leon Ristov’s short film Nikola, Nikola, which had its World Premiere in June at the…
One of the earliest scenes in supernatural horror movie Never After Dark is of everyday familial intimacy — as a young woman drives along a…
Leonardo Pirondi’s debut feature Tropicais Fractais isn’t your conventional sci-fi epic. There is a spaceship, a futuristic bio-dome-like built environment, AI-powered supercomputers, and the impending…
Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto forged his legendary cult status with ultraviolent, psychosexual Japanese films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Tokyo Fist, and A Snake in…
“Intergenerational trauma” is a phrase that comes up often as a therapeutic buzzword, but less often is it talked about in systemic terms. When Colette…
A stunning bird’s-eye view of the Pacific Northwest’s sprawling vistas appears several times over in The Weight, Padraic McKinley’s tense, atmospheric Depression-era thriller; it’s the…
Powwow People, the new documentary from Ho-Chunk / Pechanga director Sky Hopinka is somewhat more straightforward than the experimental filmmaking that first gained Hopinka notoriety.…
Hope, South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s first foray into big-budget science fiction, is still very much a Na film. The hapless main characters, the thrilling,…
Looking back to the heyday of the New Queer Cinema movement that ruled the ’90s (the term itself was coined by film critic and scholar…
Since I first reviewed Chronovisor in my Rotterdam coverage this past February, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s feature debut has become a miniature sensation. Not…
There’s a category of media that takes juvenile gleefulness in tarnishing comforting and wholesome nostalgic imagery with violence, sex, and existential darkness. Early internet games…
After Latvia became the first Baltic country to win an Academy Award with Flow in 2025, Conan O’Brien joked, “Ball’s in your court, Estonia!” The…
The verdant hills of a resort’s private golf course serve as the backdrop for Rafael Manuel’s debut feature, Filipiñana; a strikingly picturesque setting that is…