Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against…
For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how so few contemporary filmmakers…
“Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The question is posed from one beleaguered raver to another, on a school bus somewhere…
For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome…
Bouchra, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s unusual, surprising, and often moving debut feature, centers on the relationship between its eponymous character, a queer Moroccan filmmaker…
A woman, beautiful and a touch removed, travels to Switzerland from Argentina to accept an award. She throws the glass statuette in the bathroom trash,…
A visual motif that reoccurs throughout Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, is a spiral staircase. Beyond being chic and Parisian in the way…
Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts with his…
A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies…
Delicately unfurling as an introductory vocabulary lesson, one informed by the portraiture at the film’s core — that of the formidable Thi Hau Cao, a…
Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a storm of…
If the end of the world left the children in charge, what kind of future might they build? This question simmers underneath a surface of…
One would be hard-pressed to identify a film director on the world stage who has done a better job of articulating our historical moment than…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
No matter how common the surroundings or how ordinary the story may be, a Christian Petzold film always catches the viewer by surprise. His films…
In Sentimental Value, there’s a scene where the veteran filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, explains to his newly discovered lead actress, Rachel Kemp,…
To the avid film festival observer, the gargantuan, Odyssean works of Filipino director Lav Diaz competing or winning an award is something of a staple.…
Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk seems likely to be the most important film to screen at the 2025…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
A white person adrift in an “exotic” land, losing themselves in order to find themselves in the perceived primitiveness, peculiarity, or freedom of their strange…