About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas are…
Like his 2012 masterpiece Tabu, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour uses the transition from the silent to the sound era to explore the passage into a…
A few key components of Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down, his full-length directorial debut, may bring to mind another small-scale Irish drama that recently brought…
Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel, these…
Grand Theft Hamlet is not what it says on the tin. Opening shots of landscape simulacra make readily apparent the aesthetic promise of staging a…
The Girl with the Needle, the third feature film by Swedish director Magnus von Horn, wastes no time in announcing to the viewer that it…
One thing left uncertain: just who are Dorothy Gale’s parents? I don’t quite mean that literally, though the overgrown Oz extended universe probably has an…
Andrea Arnold is not without talent, but she has some of the worst instincts of any allegedly major director. Take Fish Tank, for example. Not…
Before making her feature film debut with 2019’s Atlantics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop produced a series of poetic short films, all of which explored a…
Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one of…
Six years ago Zia Anger’s live cinema presentation My First Film (from which the film My First Film is adapted) sparked a fire around her…
Crossing opens with a title card stating that Georgian and Turkish are gender-neutral languages, with grammar not containing gender-oriented articles. We then are introduced to…
Not that every filmmaker is expected to prove their unique vision upon signing their directorial debut, but French-Greek actress and dancer Ariane Labed, unfortunately, had…
In her previous film Wet Sand, Georgian director Elene Naveriani depicted a clash between the urbane, laid-back values of Tbilisi and the small-minded cruelty of…
In a 2021 Bomb Magazine interview with RaMell Ross, filmmaker Turner Ross articulates the method that he and his brother, Bill, utilize when embarking upon…
With Yannick, filmmaker and absurdist Quentin Dupieux has synthesized the irreverent, a product of his usual gags and conceits, and the satirical, afforded by his…
To the uninitiated, written descriptions of Radu Jude’s cinema might give the wrong impression of his films as dizzyingly dialectical exercises requiring a complete working…
Vacation in Malia on the Greek island of Crete, a British tourist hub that might as well be hedonism incarnate, doesn’t end well for the…
A lush, elemental reckoning unfurls across the relatively condensed runtime of Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s debut, The Settlers, even if few of its proceedings strictly qualify…
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film Fallen Leaves is a continuation of his Proletariat series. The previous films — Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988),…
When Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days was announced to play in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, his first since 2008’s totally forgotten Palermo Shooting,…