One of the biggest pitfalls of depicting and representing trauma arrives precisely and most insidiously in what appears to be its greatest strength: by grafting…
If Are You Lonesome Tonight? makes your memory stray to A Brighter Summer Day, that’s intentional. Save for taking their titles from the same Elvis…
Though frequently overt in its commentary, Medusa still enthralls thanks to its formally and functionally immersive world-building. Set in an alternate Brazil where evangelical conservatism has all…
The competing modes of The Tsugua Diaries result in the sense of one film slapped upon another, Gomes’ adventurousness sacrificed in the name of the contemporaneous. The…
Petite Maman is both Sciamma’s most intimate and epic work, a gently profound fable about youth’s uneasy passage into adulthood. Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed…
The Girl and the Spider is a bit of a symphony of sights and sounds that occasionally plays like too much of a recapitulation of The…
Întregalde is a humble, human-scaled story expertly told and sure to be one of the best films of the year. Radu Muntean might not be as well…
Train Again is yet another bold, precise, and transcendental work from Peter Tscherkassky. As InRO contributor Brendan Nagle once observed, the image — 24 of them…
A Night of Knowing Nothing is a fascinating work of formal and intellectual hybridity. Beautifully dispatched through its entanglement of formal hybridity, Payal Kapadia’s A Night…
Erudite and playful and moving, The Worst Person in the World is brimming with ideas and feeling, and executed with the touch of a master storyteller. First…
There’s plenty of aesthetic polish to Futura, but it’s largely mitigated by the bland, reductive didacticism at its aging core. “How do you do, fellow…
Jockey has an undeniable soulfulness, but suffers from its overly familiar narrative shape and beats. While each individual film should be judged according to its own…
Dumont’s recent shift into outright absurdity and his exuberant mistrust of form is most thrillingly realized in France, and particularly in Seydoux’s remarkable performance. Bruno…
Drive My Car is the latest proof that Ryusuke Hamaguchi is thinking much bigger than most of his contemporaries. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has fast become one of…
Violet is a distinctly 21st-century woman-celebrating flick, perhaps a bit saddled by its too trite messaging, but still something of a feminist force of nature.…
Snakehead foregrounds its lead actress to magnificent effective, offering a film far more singular than its generic setup suggests. Snakehead starts with a rather deceptively benign…
Bergman Island is an intentionally ephemeral, frictionless bit of meta-fiction, conceptually justifiable but all the more frustrating for it. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally,…
I’m Your Man has a clarity and vibrancy in its direction that isn’t achieved in its high-concept thematic concerns. Questions of humanity and love are pondered…
“Misfortune departs, grace comes in,” says a villager, as she takes a knife to a Kaffan-leaden woman’s hand. In brightly-lit, glossy handheld, Agata (Celeste Cescutti)…
One of two films debuting in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight by actresses thrust into the spotlight thanks to Céline Sciamma’s masterful Portrait of a Lady…
Of Stan Brakhage’s ephemeral Desert, Fred Camper once wrote that “large and small, and inner and outer, worlds dance about each other in a kind…