From his early short films to his two breakout features, Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Staying Vertical (2016), Alain Guiraudie has long conveyed a…
Will-o’-the-Wisp, João Pedro Rodrigues’s long-awaited follow-up feature to The Ornithologist, almost seems to take the form of a sketch. Running a slender 67 minutes and…
For years now, director Ursula Meier has been interested in boundaries and the reasons we cross them. Her debut feature Strong Shoulders (2003) is about…
The Swimmer is yet another skin-thin film about gay men that is unfortunately more interested in titillation than characterization. The Israeli gay coming-of-age drama The Swimmer…
Petrov’s Flu is an entirely maximalist formal exercise, one boasting a technical bravura that will impress as many as it puts off. A smoker’s cough that…
Ozon’s frivolous Fassbinder homage doesn’t quite engrave much that is substantive or memorable. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tragically short and tormented life has been the subject…
Girl Picture is a pop-oriented confection of little substance, vapid writing, and seeming contempt for its characters. Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture is a confounding frustration. Set…
Marx Can Wait is a beautiful late work from an artist still pushing the limits of his self-exploration. One of the great canonical directors of…
Saturday Fiction is a formally enterprising and experimental work that delivers as an exercise in digital esotericism. Set amidst the spy games of Allied and…
Nitrate Kisses opens with a lengthy quote by Adrienne Rich, stating that “whatever is unnamed will become […] not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.” The two…
I Was a Simple Man is a wildly contradictory affair, rife with unresolved ideas and a deluge a thematic material that find little purchase. “Maybe we…
Minyan is a delicate film of subtle power, smartly weaving several threads into a rich coming-of-age portrait. Set in 1980s New York, Eric Steel’s Minyan is…
Cicada is tonally uneven and its sum is less than its parts, but it still often works on the strength of its authenticity and small honesties.…
Mogul Mowgli doesn’t quite know how to weight its issues or manage its scant runtime, but Ahmed keeps things raw and poignant. Rather strangely, Bassam Tariq’s…
Bad Tales certainly tries hard but comes off mostly like an artfully-directed after-school special. The stink of desperation wafts heavily from Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s…
Monsoon is a poetic, aching work that details both the reclamation and awakening of one man’s lost identity. The alienation of a Vietnamese expatriate named Kit…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From the…
Nearly everything and everybody is disgusting in Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove. That is, besides an attractive blonde high schooler whom serial killer/rapist Fritz Honka…
Film history is chock full of men falling in love with the ‘whore with a heart of gold,’ either to the effect of their own…
A young man heads to Singapore in search of his mother’s family after his father, a successful ramen chef, dies. Gauzy flashbacks fill in his parents’…
Alain Gomis, a French director of Guinea-Bissauian and Senegalese descent, knows the value of a good face. This is why he fills so many of Félicité’s frames…