The Witches of the Orient once again testifies to Faraut’s facility with crafting surprising, poignant sports docs with plenty of formal character. It’s exciting to see Julien Faraut’s name attached to a new film, his first since 2018’s John McEnroe: In The Realm of Perfection…
Spring Blossom feels under-realized on the whole, but at least introduces a distinct authorial voice worth following. Part of the official selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival that never was, Spring Blossom sees Suzanne Lindon, daughter of renowned French actors Vincent Lindon and Sandrine…
Hope is an emotionally brutal, bruising film about the tricky territory that comes between love and loss. Hope is the kind of film that, on paper at least, sounds like made-for-TV melodrama, its material ripe for big emotions and rampant sentimentality; and in the…
The Fever has plenty on its mind and is considerably weighty in its own right, but feels somewhat too indebted to obvious, superior arthouse touchstones. “They woke up something that was asleep inside of us. They made us see what we didn’t know.” The imprecision…
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream isn’t the exercise in solipsism or self-serving appropriative art its premise threatens, but its overall effect is one of cautious distance. In 2010, visual artist Christian Marclay premiered a new montage work, titled The Clock, that was 24-hours in length…
To the Ends of the Earth is a masterwork of adventurous, boundary-less filmmaking. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film is set — and which is indeed new territory, geographically speaking — but to this border zone openly contested…
Fire Will Come retains a kind of documentary-based fascination even as it becomes clear capturing the titular blaze was the only real objective here. Oliver Laxe‘s Fire Will Come is a film built upon two contrasting modes. On one hand, there’s its ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere,…
The Wolf House is a darkly magical fairy tale of arthouse cinema. To describe a film as magical may be a usually empty judgment, but in the case of Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s The Wolf House, it is, in fact, fitting. It is…
Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest is a rhythmic, matter-of-fact portrait of economic compromise. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Earth, from the outset, frames its massive landscapes as sites of continual transformation; large-scale machinery usually litters the frame, excavating the planet indiscriminately and gradually altering its surface. Most of this…
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is a documentary with an almost confounding resolve to simply document. Given the subject matter — the intertwined lives of four different groups of African-Americans living in the deep South during the summer of 2017…
