Unlike Puiu’s similarly-shaped Sieranevada, Malmkrog is all empty abstraction, mistaking prattle for praxis. “For a talking cinema”: that’s the title that a young Maurice Scherer, not yet…
Beginning emerges from the influence of obvious formal antecedents to become a stirring, singular work from a new cinematic worth following. On its surface, Dea…
Liborio’s initial enigmas ultimately give way to something tidier and less pleasantly challenging. Olivorio Mateo, a farmer-turned-prophet whose providential oversight and teachings later influenced…
There is potential potency to the character work in A Family Tour, but the flat direction renders nearly every scene frustratingly inert. There’s no…
Wonders in the Suburbans is an unwieldy affair, taking supposedly comedic pot-shots at any number of targets without any clear vision. Jeanne Balibar’s brand of…
Dolan’s latest intrigues in deviating from the director’s familiar mode, but its busyness never fully distills into any cogent statement. Matthias & Maxime, the…
Taking as his subject the Japanese company Family Romance LLC, director Werner Herzog returns to offer a work widely labelled as ‘strange’ by the media that…
MS Slavic 7 is an ambiguous, mechanistic work that seeks to understand the divide (and bridge) between passion and scholarship. Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell’s…
The first feature-length work from avant-garde filmmaker/animator/composer Jodie Mack defies easy categorization. The Grand Bizarre is a sort of musical (like her Yard Work…
Set in the remote valley of Qadishi, in Northern Lebanon, Abbas Fahdel’s Yara is a limited, if verdant vision of quotidian life. Centered on…
The latest film from Filipino director Lav Diaz to make it to US streaming services is the almost four-hour long, politically charged, a cappella…
If Gerardo Naranjo hadn’t already taken the title I’m Gonna Explode for his 2008 portrait of adolescent rebellion, it would have made a fitting…
Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (which first premiered in 2016, but is only now getting a release Stateside this year, thanks…
It’s probably safe to say that Sylvia Chang’s Love Education is the kind of film that is impossible to get made in America at this point…
Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure was not, by most metrics, a hit, but it wasn’t a failure either; it made a small amount of money…
The narrative framework of Helena Wittmann’s Drift revolves around two women, each going their own separate ways after spending some time together in northern Germany. One of…
Brothers of the Night concerns a loose network of young Bulgarian men who, unable to find work in Vienna, instead prowl the city streets…
“Seen through the wrong end of a telescope, an ordinary scene becomes an ancient story. No, it’s not nostalgia! It’s heartache for all that’s…