Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller that grows in unsettling power across its runtime. Andreas Fontana’s Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller, carefully organizing a deceptively…
Diaz’s signature long-takes here work more to push the material into territory of fatalism rather than substantive political observation. Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s…
Yellow Cat is the kind of cribbing-as-mode film that illuminates nothing other than the kinds of movies its director likes. Godard once declared that all you…
Purple Sea is an arthouse trifle that merely effects the posture of serious cinema. In his 1975 book Notes on the Cinematographer, austere French director Robert…
Generations isn’t doing anything all that novel for static-shot documentary filmmaking, but as an exercise in how to watch cinema, it’s a plenty worthy effort. Stop me if…
The Cloud in Her Room is an one-note exercise in empty style that fails to marry its form and content. Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in…
All Hands on Deck dabble in tropes and archetypes, but still manages a vibrancy that keeps the film afloat. One of a number of Rohmer riffs…
If Krabi 2562 fails to convince by its end, its argument is at least worth engaging with. Following a short film collaboration for the 2018 Thai…
Air Conditioner is a beautiful, thoughtful work of easygoing charm and surprising intellect. As far as cinematic representations of heat go, Ernest Dickerson’s work on Do…
The Halt is another epic and epically long Lav Diaz effort, one that might be his most accessible work yet. When dealing with Lav Diaz,…
Sweat swims in the grey areas of internet intimacy to thoughtful, sometimes unsettling results. For as long as we’ve held any conception of celebrity, it’s…
Kala azar is an obvious, stultifying, and facile lecture masquerading as art cinema. Kala-azar is the Indian name for Black Fever, a potentially fatal parasitic disease,…
Still Processing is a work of profound emotional catharsis that suggests even greater formal heights on Romvari’s horizon. Occupying a well-deserved place on TIFF’s Short Cuts…
Death Will Come is somewhat hampered by its abbreviated runtime and odd asides, but remains a moving document of love and living in the shadow of…
Much like the man at its center, State Funeral is an inscrutable, complex work. Josef Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, at his Kuntsevo dacha,…
Red Moon Tide offers impressive sonic and visual craft, but is somewhat undermined by its weaker narrative and character elements. An elegiac stillness envelops the…
IWOW is a work of pure hubris and self-aggrandizement, entirely devoid of the humanity that has informed Allah’s previous works. Over the course of his career,…
Not all of the poetic evocations of Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Those That work, but it’s still a lively, playful, and niche document of art creation.…
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 christened…
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 Kulumbegashvili’s…
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 the…