Since its debut 151 years ago, Georges Bizet’s enduring and controversial opera Carmen has inspired dozens of adaptations across mediums as varied as film, Broadway,…
“All films are time travel films, and all films are ghost films,” said filmmaker Mark Jenkin at a post-screening Q&A for the New York Film…
Cannes seems to have settled into a kind of violent habit: slotting a promising film by a female auteur into its tail end. This year’s…
Watching La Perra, the new film from Dominga Sotomayor, one may be reminded of those pet adoption bumper stickers that read “who rescued who?” In…
The Quran states that “whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity.” The Station, the debut feature from Yemeni…
For the first time in his feature career, Cristian Mungiu has shifted his critical gaze from Romania to its western neighbors. A Cannes luminary par…
As landmark movies go, Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 debut Freedom could hardly have been less fitting. A documentary/fiction hybrid chronicling one day in the life of…
The very best instances of allegory are those that allow themselves to be completely ignored. Too often, an artist only pretends to be interested in…
Sometimes the first shot of a film tells you enough to know you’re in the hands of a great director. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown —…
Pawel Pawlikowski, the immaculate king of grim black-and-white Eastern European cinema, has made us wait eight years for a new film. After the exquisite moral…
“There is a hole in the lake where the movies come from” is one of those incredible lines that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp…
Looking with a cynical eye, one might accuse Ildikó Eyendi — and not just in Silent Friend — of banality. The film’s three stories, taken…
At the beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s first feature-length documentary, Our Land (originally titled Landmarks), we’re presented with satellite images of Earth. From this zoomed out…
Originally popularized and coveted by the Western world, the esteemed traveler cut a formidable figure for its elites: the rationalists for their admiration of breathtaking…
If, with Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino set a 21st century standard for leisurely, sun-dappled, queer coming-of-age films, then, nearly a decade later,…
Alain Gomis’ new film achieves something both impressive and paradoxical. It is simultaneously intimate and panoramic. Dao is built around two very large family gatherings,…
Moments in pop music come and go, but none in recent memory have been eulogized quite like brat summer. Within a year, the promotional tail…
Charlotte Zhang’s docu-fiction of contemporary and prospective Los Angeles, Tycoon, contends with events both real and imagined, intimate and global. In it we follow Lito…
There are movies we find undoubtedly bad — movies that get us worked up, that offend us, that ruin our day — but that at…
Elaborate, ephemeral, and exceedingly difficult to pull off, the souffle takes a serious amount of skill, experience, and precision to make, but typically takes just…
Rhayne Vermette’s Levers functions, in part, as a collective portrait of a community caught in limbo: when the sun is inexplicably blocked out globally for…