Little Girl misunderstands where its focus should be and strips away most of its ambiguity, leaving little to really contend with. In the opening scene of Sébastien Lifshitz’s latest documentary feature, Little Girl, there is a shot which the French director visually encapsulates and…
Ema is Larrain’s best film yet, a technical marvel and narrative step forward that hopefully anticipates the tenor of his next stretch of work. It hasn’t always been quite clear what Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín has been working toward, nor where he might steer his…
The dull and ethically dubious Mama Weed fails to live up to the gonzo promise of its title. With a premise and (English language) title sure to inspire equal parts skepticism and amusement, Jean-Paul Salomé’s Mama Weed has the potential to be a sort of…
Summer of 85 is a weightless trifle, built on an unsophisticated narrative and featuring a patently ridiculous ending. The trailer for Summer of 85, the latest from Cannes perennial François Ozon, makes the film look something like Call Me By Your Name (2017) transposed…
The Perfect Candidate keeps the stakes low and can be cloying at times, but its story is necessary. Haifaa Al-Mansour, whose 2012 feature debut Wadjda was the first film completely shot in Saudi Arabia (and became the nation’s first Oscar submission), returns with another…
Sibyl is a film that feels richer at the margins than at the center, largely by design and to its credit. Victoria, Justine Triet’s last film, opens with Virginie Efira curled up on a couch asking her therapist where, exactly, her life became unstuck. Efira occupies…
Nomad is a passionate and heartfelt work, but Herzog’s foregrounded presence sometimes distracts from film’s more mystical ambitions. In January 1989, the legendary British adventurer, writer, and journalist, Bruce Chatwin died after a terminal battle with AIDS. It’s a tragedy that, thirty years on, inspired…
An utterly predictable narrative exercise, And Then We Danced salvages some intrigue in the celebration and presentation of its titular art. A familiar tale rears its head in Levin Akin‘s And Then We Danced, this year’s submission from Sweden for the International Feature Film Oscar. By their nature,…
François Ozon‘s latest jumps from the testimony of one character to the next, following the thread of its main subject: a priest’s sexual abuse of children over the course of many years. But at some point in the midst of developing an investment in…
Predicated on a plot that details a man with a troubled past finding his place in the world through his job at a warehouse market, one might assume that In the Aisles is yet another slice of insufferable indie quirk, or a sitcom joke-machine…
