It would be an exaggeration to call Julia Loktev’s previous documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, a smash hit. Clocking…
Fourteen years ago, Dan Sallitt burst into the indie film scene with his transgressive, funny, and ultimately sweet, The Unspeakable Act. It wasn’t Sallitt’s first…
Over drinks at a lounge in Hollywood, Chris Rock tells Rosalind Eleazar that if you go anywhere in America, there’s a chance that at some…
In this dispatch: Cameron Winter at…
Geese, for lack of a better word, is good. Heirs apparent to the art-rock mantle, they reign in the arena less because they deserve the…
German director Luise Donschen follows her own path, to put it mildly. Her 2018 debut feature, Casanova Gene, was a daring conceptual project that, in…
Even among the film festival cognoscenti, experimental films sometimes inspire their fair share of confusion. This is to be expected, since the films in question…
In this dispatch: What Can’t Be…
The obvious thing to say about Dan Sallitt’s new film, What Can’t Be Mentioned, is that it can’t be fully appreciated without first seeing its…
As the title would have us to expect, Beatrice Gibson’s At Night is indeed (mostly) a nocturnal film, but Gibson does so much more than…
Having seen all six Currents shorts programs at this year’s New York Film Festival, Program 3: Surface Noise emerged as the most successful of the…
In this dispatch: Behemoth!, Bardi…
Alex Serian has been away for a long time. At the start of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, the gifted cellist (played with great commitment by Pedro…
There is a certain expectation that comes with a film’s selection for the Currents section of the New York Film Festival, not least because the…
It’s taken a while for cinephiles (including this writer) to catch up with the Vienna-based filmmaking duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Their profile…
In this dispatch: Possible Love, Heil…
Rare is the film that earnestly inspires you to hold your loved ones closer. Rarer still is the film that does so while making room…
Whatever one thinks of Carlos Reygadas, it’s hard to argue against his ability to open a movie. His newest film Heil Jupiter!, largely spoken in…
Parsing the cinema’s relation to sound, Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “…the sound as well as visual elements of the image enter into internal relations which…
In this dispatch: All of a Sudden…
The post-Drive My Car films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi have built a case for the director as the most acclaimed contemporary filmmaker in the world. Even…