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…
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 shortage…
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 idiosyncrasy…
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 2019…
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 renders…
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 low-key,…
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 Is…
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 an…
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 musical…
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 option…
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 to…
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 in…
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 in…
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 the…
Brothers of the Night concerns a loose network of young Bulgarian men who, unable to find work in Vienna, instead prowl the city streets selling…
“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 lost.”…