In this dispatch: You Don’t Belong…
A staid frostiness envelops the frames of Florin Şerban’s smoldering latest feature, whose clinching of the top prize at its Locarno premiere serves as an…
A woman of unknown origin and, for a time, unknown purpose, Mira (Larissa Corriveau) observes. For some, her observation is distant, silently watching the people…
A purveyor of artifice and decadence, the films of Bertrand Mandico are at their most interesting on the purely visual plane. He fills his frames…
It’s fairly easy for an artist to commit themselves to a concept, less easy for them to do it justice through their art. Lê Bảo’s…
Small talk counts more critics than supporters. Pleasantries about families, careers, mutual acquaintances, or — if the conversation really gets dire — the weather, despite…
True objectivity is, practically speaking, virtually impossible when analyzing art. Each individual approaches each work of art, whether film, painting, music, literature, or so on,…
In this dispatch: Objet a, The House on…
Found family is sometimes thicker than blood, and in Amartei Armar’s uplifting feature debut, his two youthful protagonists first band together against all the world’s…
A TV narrator talks about how wealth is an illusion, while the TV is stuck on the eyes of a caiman, the Jacare of the…
The central narrative question raised by Swedish-Danish writer-director Maria Bäck in her film Brave New Love is not exactly novel: an accomplished woman is happy…
The appeal of the legend lies less, as one might think, in its relatability to mortal affairs, but precisely in its sublime, eternal otherness where…
An undeniably audacious film, Ann Oren’s Objet a is also actively irksome. At the risk of coming across as condescending, this is the sort of…
In this dispatch: The Riverbank, Hanabi…
The northern city of Recife, Brazil, enjoyed something of a renaissance last year with the success of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Garnering more…
“Four years have passed since the accident. You feel that your relationship to radioactive contamination is changing,” intones the narrator near the beginning of Ana…
Andreas Fontana’s 2021 film Azor told the story of Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship through the lens of a ground-level functionary, observing how unremarkable bankers and…
It’s a common refrain that it takes an outsider filmmaker to capture the truth of a place. An influx of Germans like Billy Wilder and…
Georgian filmmaker Uta Beria’s Tear Gas opens on a series of still images depicting people in migration, which eventually bleeds into the moving image as…
Schematically, one could divide Hong Sang-soo’s oeuvre into two sets of films: on the one hand, those where the structural play with narrative is upfront…
Who could forget that scene in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s character narrates what life is like in prison for “wiseguys”? As his cellmates slice garlic…