Independent American filmmaking in the 1970s features many showcases of distinctive actor-director relationships. One of them: Joan Micklin Silver and her many great actors,…
In the 1980s, a loose-knit group of Canadian filmmakers began producing and directing independent films that gained national recognition around an aesthetic of kitchen-sink…
Universal Language is, at its core, a community portrait. Matthew Rankin’s second feature was co-written and imagined by friends and collaborators Pirouz Namati and…
Joshua Oppenheimer was made famous by two recursive exercises of direct cinema that saw him interrogate, through both performance and observation, the personal and…
Imagine being seated for a program of experimental films at a prestigious film festival. The room is packed with people who are willing to…
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are very serious about film. Film itself, that is, and particularly the consumer-ready format of Super-8 that at one…
Across three features Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most vital contemporary voices in American cinema. After the positive reception to…
Among cinephiles, Guy Maddin has long reigned with the celebration and consolation of being “the most accessible avant-gardist.” Since breaking out of obscurity with…
It’s been hard for me to describe Jinho Myung’s debut feature Softshell (2024) ever since it premiered at New/Next Film Festival on the first…
Ghosts of workers lost to corporate violence in Jakarta and Korea; a future media archaeologist picking through Indonesia’s fossilized e-waste; sand miners under the…
Sofia Bohdanowicz has always been a filmmaker unafraid to mine the uncomfortable depths of her own, and her family’s, history. Across 10 years of…
Aaron Schimberg’s third feature, A Different Man, is a genre-bending character portrait of Edward (Sebastian Stan, wearing a prosthetic mask), a lonely and failed…
Among the boldest of the great Argentine films that emerged at the start of the 2000s was Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut La Libertad, a…
2024 has been the most prolific year of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s career; last February he presented at the Berlinale Chime, his long-awaited comeback to the…
With four features and twice as many short films under his belt, writer-director Kazik Radwanski has become one of the leading lights of Canadian…
Pascal Plante’s third feature, Red Rooms, premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, before screening to both critical and popular acclaim at Fantasia, where…
To its considerable credit, Stephen Soucy’s recent documentary, Merchant Ivory (2024), resists the tendency toward hagiography. It’s an understandably tempting opportunity, composed as the…
Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez premiered their new film, Invention, at Locarno last month, not quite sure what kind of life or reception it…