Monica Sorelle’s feature debut, Mountains, is refreshingly simple. It follows demolition worker Xavier (Abiton Nazaire), a Haitian immigrant living in the Little Haiti neighborhood…
Actor-turned-director Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love opens with a philosophical debate. In a brown-toned home, inflected with ember and golden highlights, old friends…
A French drama exploring a complicated, ultimately toxic marriage told from the perspective of a desperate wife and mother, Valérie Donzelli’s Just the Two…
Shorthand as a methodology of narrative semiotics is not an inherently troubled strategy through which to divulge information, especially as it regards intimate relationships…
Part of a generation of First Nations filmmakers that also includes Rachel Perkins (Radiance, Bran Nue Dae), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country,…
The latest piece of cotton candy in the ever-prolific François Ozon’s filmography, The Crime is Mine (Mon Crime) finds him restaging a 1934 play…
The metatextual fortune cookie message (e.g. “Help! I’m being held hostage in a fortune cookie factory!”) is an obvious premise for a joke, indeed…
Non-fiction scenarios and non-professional actors are often characterized as so rich and unpredictable that all a director needs to be is a receiver for…
It goes without saying that the city of Paris, more than any other megalopolis, has — as a constant of film history — provided…
A wonderfully realized portrait of the alienation experienced by both a mother and her child, Italian filmmaker Emanuele Crialese’s brilliantly colorful and touching L’Immensita…
Outside the confines of polite Parisian society, there lies a wild west on wheels, in a subculture known as the urban rodeo. Though participation…
Leonor Will Never Die is a sweetly thoughtful drama disguised as loving genre throwback, with perhaps a pinch of cannier discourse creeping beneath its…
Please Baby Please is a gauche and grimy good time, and might wind up as 2022’s best bit of playful kink. It’s the rare film…
Cousins’ latest The Story of Film entry largely trades in hyperbole, platitude, and bland observation, rendering it little more than a 150-minute trailer binge. For…
Though frequently overt in its commentary, Medusa still enthralls thanks to its formally and functionally immersive world-building. Set in an alternate Brazil where evangelical conservatism has…
Lost Illusions is a lush, ravishing work that avoids the lethargy and empty aesthetics of so many literary adaptions and fully embodies the spectacle…
Strawberry Mansion is a vision still worth experiencing, even as its muddled with an ill-considered screenplay rife with tired twee tropes. In 2017, Kentucker Audley…
Little Girl misunderstands where its focus should be and strips away most of its ambiguity, leaving little to really contend with. In the opening…