Mad Bills to Pay “The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad…
Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her…
“The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills to Pay (or…
The middle class context of Kostis Charamountanis’ Kyuka: Before Summer’s End gives its story of a languid, European summer vacation a refreshingly dressed-down feel.…
One of the harshest realities in life is a lack of closure. The sudden death of a loved one, the dissolution of a serious…
The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism,…
Of Living Without Illusion A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier…
New Directors/New Films takes a certain amount of pride in the names they’ve launched, and it’s not unjustified: any festival that can boast Hou…
A long take is a relationship. It looks still and it contains and collides all its insides. Details from earlier — in the film,…
In his book Codes For North, filmmaker and film historian Stephen Broomer posits a history of experimental film as an “art that is a…
There’s really nothing wrong with The Permanent Picture, the debut feature from Catalan director Laura Ferrés. It features two skillful lead performances, is exceedingly…
The sophomore film from Brazilian director André Novais Oliveira is a charming cinematic miniature that observes the unfolding of an ordinary day that potentially…
David Depesseville’s debut feature, Astrakan, is a film that is at once deeply humanist and utterly pitiless. Essentially a character study, the film depicts…
Umut Subaşı’s debut feature, Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster, is a curious beast. In many regards, it’s quite accomplished, and displays some very decisive…
Even for those who haven’t seen Alena Lodkina’s first feature, 2017’s Strange Colours, given the quality of her new film, Petrol, it should be…
“Dostoyevsky Iranian style,” reads one positive review of Leila’s Brothers, the third feature film by Saeed Roustaee, and in a way that writer has…
Argentinian filmmaker Melisa Liebenthal’s 2019 short film, Aquí y Allá (“Here and There”), utilized Google Earth, in-film, to pinpoint the exact location where it…
Ariadine Zampaulo’s Maputo Nakuzandza begins with a distressingly bleak sequence: a group of boys approach an open car and peer inside, commenting on an…