Patrick Wang has been operating on his own terms since his filmmaking career began in 2011 with In the Family. The nearly three-hour story of…
A monkey’s paw-inspired horror film that’s not-so-secretly about the loss of free will and specifically women being subjugated by their partners, Obsession — from 26-year-old…
While possessing the backdrop and aesthetics of a social realist drama, the narrative foundation of writer-director Pierre Le Gall’s debut feature Flesh and Fuel takes…
Not Arthur Rimbaud, but A. Rimbaud. The title of Patrick Wang’s latest film is the skeleton key that unlocks the principles behind its approach to…
When Affection opens, our protagonist (Jessica Rothe) is facedown on a road. It would appear she’s been in a car wreck. She stands up, stumbles…
Surely critics will be quick to note that The Beloved (El ser querido) strongly recalls last year’s Sentimental Value, as Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s seventh feature film…
In The Diary of a Chambermaid, Radu Jude returns to one of his favorite subjects: Europe, as a bad joke. This time, the joke comes…
At the 75th edition of Cannes, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022) sparked considerable attention, premiering in Un Certain Regard. This playfully reimagined portrait of…
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…
A great way to insult the Circassian men in Butterfly Jam is to say they’re weak. Even worse is to call them a “pussy.” Somewhat…
If you’re trying to escape from Anywhere, perhaps the only alternative is… nowhere. This is the agonizing reality that director Alberto Vázquez (Birdboy, Unicorn Wars)…
Only one month after The Christophers opened in theaters, we have been gifted another film about art forgery in the form of Jing Ai Ng’s…
Jérôme Reybaud’s concise, lacerating film A Balcony in Limoges appears at first to be an odd-couple comedy, albeit with unresolved psychological trouble churning under the…
“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…
Character-driven documentaries place their subjects in a vulnerable position, allowing filmmakers to construct the version of life that will remain attached to them forever. In his…
When Blerta Basholli premiered her debut feature Hive in 2021, it played like a small miracle. The Kosovar Albanian director broke records at Sundance, taking…
Koki, Ciao, the award-winning Dutch experimental short film, is dictated by an unusual protagonist with a storied life, known for charming the likes of Sophia…
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over a decade after the annexation of Crimea, a desire to put the inner…
While some cinema traditionalists may wring their hands at the prospect of YouTubers taking over the world, we’re at a point where it’s no longer…
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, except for Leos Carax’s bizarro musical Annette (2021), the last decade of the Cannes Film Festival has boasted some…
It is not a steady wind that brings Nietzsche to the criticism of Magnificent Obsession, a film whose slavish self-sacrifice would doubtless atomize the long-dead…