The decadent luxury and moral rot of extreme wealth; a location as isolated as it is idyllic; lithe young bodies glistening in sunlight; the churning…
A frontier western without any ontologically stable sense of indigeneity or the homestead, Pablo Aparo’s The Victors is a film that resists the easy binaries…
Like his previous feature, which opens with a 1988 Coca-Cola ad, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon begins with another vintage commercial — or, at least, a…
The critical concept of intersectionality, like “wokeness” or “critical race theory,” has been evacuated of its actual meaning by bad-faith bloggers and the conservative commentariat.…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die is the Palestinian filmmaker and archivist’s cinematic “answer” to the pioneering Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s invitation to collaborate,…
The main narrative engine, if there’s any to speak of, in Serra’s only other documentary, Afternoons of Solitude, was about trapping its subject in three…
In this excerpt: Donkey Princess…
Few worlds in cinema are as unmistakable as those of Chilean visual-art virtuosos Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, whose astonishing craft is matched by the…
Representation does not equal inclusion. With ostensibly good intentions and plenty of compassion, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s attempt at telling the story of refugee…
The inline skate is a useful metaphor for the life of Alex (Ani Mesa-Perez), the young woman on the cusp of adulthood in Erin Vassilopoulos’…
The aesthetics of liminality, arising from online images and storytelling revolving around emptied public spaces and mediated encounters with the uncanny, have lately penetrated cinema.…
In his most recent short The Wind, One Brilliant Day, Ben Rivers takes on a poem-in-translation by the Spanish modernismo writer Antonio Machado, né Antonio…
If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of…
Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under…
Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the…
Isolationism breeds a variety of affects that spur those involved toward indelibly discrete action. In many, Sho Miyake’s latest, Two Seasons, Two Strangers, courses the…
Sophy Romvari has used cinema to mine the fractured, seemingly incomplete nature of her family history since her first short film, Nine Behind. In that…
Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of…
In Sentimental Value, there’s a scene where the veteran filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, explains to his newly discovered lead actress, Rachel Kemp,…
Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against…