In this dispatch: Objet a, The House on…
Found family is sometimes thicker than blood, and in Amartei Armar’s uplifting feature debut, his two youthful protagonists first band together against all the world’s…
A TV narrator talks about how wealth is an illusion, while the TV is stuck on the eyes of a caiman, the Jacare of the…
The central narrative question raised by Swedish-Danish writer-director Maria Bäck in her film Brave New Love is not exactly novel: an accomplished woman is happy…
The appeal of the legend lies less, as one might think, in its relatability to mortal affairs, but precisely in its sublime, eternal otherness where…
An undeniably audacious film, Ann Oren’s Objet a is also actively irksome. At the risk of coming across as condescending, this is the sort of…
In this dispatch: The Riverbank, Hanabi…
The northern city of Recife, Brazil, enjoyed something of a renaissance last year with the success of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Garnering more…
“Four years have passed since the accident. You feel that your relationship to radioactive contamination is changing,” intones the narrator near the beginning of Ana…
Andreas Fontana’s 2021 film Azor told the story of Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship through the lens of a ground-level functionary, observing how unremarkable bankers and…
It’s a common refrain that it takes an outsider filmmaker to capture the truth of a place. An influx of Germans like Billy Wilder and…
Georgian filmmaker Uta Beria’s Tear Gas opens on a series of still images depicting people in migration, which eventually bleeds into the moving image as…
Schematically, one could divide Hong Sang-soo’s oeuvre into two sets of films: on the one hand, those where the structural play with narrative is upfront…
A few years ago while re-watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma, I was taken aback when 2a: Only Cinema ended with a durational shot of…
A frontier western without any ontologically stable sense of indigeneity or the homestead, Pablo Aparo’s The Victors is a film that resists the easy binaries…
Like his previous feature, which opens with a 1988 Coca-Cola ad, Nicolaas Schmidt’s September Afternoon begins with another vintage commercial — or, at least, a…
The critical concept of intersectionality, like “wokeness” or “critical race theory,” has been evacuated of its actual meaning by bad-faith bloggers and the conservative commentariat.…
An opening shot of a bleeding, near-dead girl dragging herself across a tennis court in pitch darkness, only to be knocked out by a single…
In 1970, Robb Moss took a semester off from Berkeley and started wandering to wherever he could crash, first out to a friend’s farm in…
Back when labels were willing to spend on them, music videos served as a legitimate pipeline for visual artists, places for them to cut their…
The quaint and rustic settlement of Sangerhausen, in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt, might have been an incidental choice of setting, but much of Julian Radlmaier’s quietly revelatory…