I observe a Dry January most years. Usually, I drink to a moderate level, and prefer alcohol as a sedative rather than as a party…
A woman gazes out a window before heading to an event to receive an award. As the pleasantries die down, her smile fades, and she…
Renoir went relatively unnoticed when it premiered in competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, its squat, youthful perspective perhaps lost amid the crowd of…
They may be a dying breed, but filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and Sean Baker remain steadfast in their commitment to shooting all of…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: after witnessing the senseless slaughter of her parents, a young woman barely escapes with her life and…
A commonly held belief about Chinese documentary cinema is that, prior to the 1990s and the “New Documentary Movement,” the work of their filmmakers consisted…
The pursuit of meaning in life is a negatory one. The more one seeks understanding, the more mystery one discovers. The more one learns to…
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,…
As someone whose first airplane experience was a slightly traumatic flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis not long after 9/11, it was a perplexing experience to…
The first entry of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy and one of the last titles he made in the 1970s, the decade he’d defined with…
In an age of rapid acceleration and environmental decay, the act of preservation remains a preeminent concern — not only for the ecologist, but also…
For Tim Geraghty and Sarah Halpern, the process of making Monument, a, well, monumental four-and-a-half-hour experimental documentary that’s ostensibly about the diminutive but shockingly consequential…
The opening minutes of Kane Parsons’ directorial debut, Backrooms, are as good as old-school found footage horror gets. We’re stuck in the claustrophobic POV of a man…
On November 1 and 2, 2001, then-28-year-old Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari visited Gaza, and left with about two hours and forty minutes worth of MiniDV…
It’s perhaps too easy to dismiss a film as heavily aestheticized and intentionally non-narrative as Jonathan Rosado’s Matador Bolero for prioritizing style over substance. The…
I will admit it upfront: had I been told that one of my favorite films at Cannes 2026 would be one about a woman in…
“His parents were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall struck its uniform beat, the wind whistled by the rattling windows; the…
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…
In the 1960s, the sociologist duo Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss noticed a phenomenon quite common in healthcare. What they call “a ritual…
A presupposition of Bruno Dumont’s cinema is that the bare world into which we enter is circumscribed by moral order. This should not be confused…
A ghost story doesn’t always have to manifest in slamming doors and falling objects. A possession might not send your body writhing in manic contortions…