Nothing stays buried under the snow forever. In the early ‘90s, Chile was a country eager not just to move forward, but to prove it…
With The Blood Countess, Ulrike Ottinger makes the case that there’s only one suitable way to open a movie where Isabelle Huppert plays a resurrected…
The cinema of Clio Barnard takes place in corners of the world familiar to those living in, or near, them, but invisible to those living…
It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s The Idiot(s) hates its subjects. The film purports to chronicle the events around Fyodor…
Passion is subsumed into stricture in Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering, a graceful Burmese drama about the relationship between two colleagues at a garment factory. Patient…
Sometimes, the riskiest thing to do can be to play it safe. With her 2016 breakthrough and solo directorial debut, Wolf and Sheep, Shahrbanoo Sadat…
“Can the copy of something embody the truth of its original self?” The world we have built for ourselves is an ersatz one. We gaze…
In Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon, Josette (Josette Kwanya) is a widowed 80-year-old living alone in her vast house. All her children are scattered…
Troubled souls trapped: the parameters of a typical Claire Denis narrative are rarely complex. Beau Travail’s French Foreign Legion soldiers were confined to their base…
A moment of peculiar poignancy opens Erige Sehiri’s sensitive, if somewhat unremarkable, Promised Sky. A young girl is being bathed by three women as she…
Looking with a cynical eye, one might accuse Ildikó Eyendi — and not just in Silent Friend — of banality. The film’s three stories, taken…
An 11-minute standing ovation at Cannes can’t be called a total disaster. Nevertheless, Alpha arrived at the 2025 London Film Festival trailing a, shall we…
If you weren’t around to experience it in real time, it will be hard to grasp how seismic the 2002 FIFA World Cup feud between…
An old army colleague of mine, Colonel Cosgrove, wept today. He wept at a world so crude and bleak. “Could it be,” his red eyes…
Poverty and opulence, the pastoral and the high-tech, war and peace, childhood and adulthood. Opposite ends of a variety of spectrums meet, and sometimes clash,…
It’s June 1993 in rural Nigeria. Remi and his younger brother Akin (real-life brothers Chibuike Marvelous Egbo and Godwin Egbo) are bickering, eating food and…
“The voices on the phone are real.” So states the caption that appears on screen early in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab,…
A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar…
There comes a tale from an antique land. A King ruled over a thin Isthmus, above and below which were two unfathomably large continents. A…
An older couple congratulates producer Georges de Beauregard on the success of his magnificent new film — politely interrupting young Jean-Luc Godard, who has been…
Nouvelle Vague An older couple congratulates producer Georges de Beauregard on the success of his magnificent new film — politely interrupting young Jean-Luc Godard, who…