Wang Bing films have a reputation for their difficulty, but the opening film in his Youth trilogy, Youth (Spring), managed to be surprisingly varied and…
Director Christoph Hochhäusler arrived on the international scene in the early aughts, as the film world began discovering a plethora of unique, formally inventive movies…
The Seed of the Sacred Fig As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed…
In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First Reformed…
Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in a…
By the Stream In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development…
First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever, a…
Only a few minutes into his 100,000,000,000,000, 48-year-old French filmmaker Virgil Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis) presents to viewers a gang of four young escorts who,…
Drowning Dry Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother.…
For theists, the problem of evil has presented a nagging counterpoint to unchallenged belief in God, though sometimes it is precisely the challenge of proving…
The most emotionally and spiritually invigorating faith-based films rely not on proselytization or condemnation, but on abstraction. Their dramatic force comes from their characters’ tormented…
Despite being active for roughly five decades, with a handful of theatrical and television works within his filmography — including his 1980 debut To Love…
Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age sensibilities…
The Sparrow in the Chimney Those who have seen the Zürcher twins’ other works, The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider, may…
Despite his increasing arthouse acclaim, Radu Jude has never been associated with a distinct stylistic stamp; indeed, he has long flitted between various formalist modes,…
Death Will Come, German director Christoph Hochhäusler’s latest feature (and first French-language production), follows a contract killer, Tez (Sophie Veerbeck), who is hired by an…
For a certain type of documentary, intimate access to one’s subject is a double-edged sword. Leila Amini’s debut film is a close look at her…
There must be some sort of an unwritten connection between the warmth of summer and the heat of one’s newfound emotions, the ripeness in the…
Though comfortably placed in the more adventurous screening programs at film festivals, Eduardo Williams’ work has also managed to stand proudly independent of the dominant…
Lucy Kerr’s feature debut Family Portrait begins in media res, at the titular scene. There’s chaos, but initially the chaos is only visual. The soundtrack…
Prior to the premiere of The Old Oak at Cannes back in May, Ken Loach indicated that this would be his last feature film. Granted,…