To the avid film festival observer, the gargantuan, Odyssean works of Filipino director Lav Diaz competing or winning an award is something of a staple.…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
Ira Sachs’ 2010 short film Last Address presents an unadorned montage of New York City apartment buildings and rowhouses, each of which once housed an…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been arguably the greatest filmmaker of the last decade, his works across this period constituting one of the most impressive contemporary bodies…
In 2001, Jia Zhangke made Unknown Pleasures, in which Zhao Tao plays a woman named Qiao Qiao who tries to make a living as a…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve…
Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia begins, as so many stories do, with a homecoming. When first introduced, 30-something Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) is driving to his rural hometown…
The village schoolteacher, taciturn but possessed of intellectual passions, plays a newly delivered recording of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” for his class, most of whom…
After spending his early career transfiguring the aesthetics of early Jean-Luc Godard and other works from the French New Wave’s starting days for his own…
Whenever a film critic, especially one who has probably only played a very limited number of games in their life, argues that a film is…
The psychoanalytical turn of film theory in the 1970s, foundational to critical and theoretical film discourses on cinema to date, has always had a particularly…
As Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade, Last Summer scans initially as an altogether more mannered affair for the director. Known for her sexually…
Evil Does Not Exist is the sort of film one makes after winning an Oscar. Following the massive success of Drive My Car, which has…
“You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.” So declares May Bartram to John Marcher, both doomed lovers of Henry…
Writing about Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is a challenge, not least because of its stark minimalism. I can’t recall a concert film as ascetically committed…
When first introduced in About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest feature, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher, has been in the remote village of…
From the first moments of Tótem, it’s easy to think about Lucas Dhont, which is never a good thing. Like Dhont’s recently released Close, Lila…
Berlinale’s Encounters section has largely been a platform for lesser known filmmakers since its inception, though it’s also seen its fair share of high profile…
In Christian Petzold’s latest film, sexual tensions rumble with such intensity that the only natural outcome is the eruption of a devastating forest fire. Afire…
Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Eight Mountains opens with a young man’s voiceover accompanying a series of natural Italian…
Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks — The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a Shadow (1958),…