There is a striking early scene with an unknown woman that cuts deep into the sensory motif embedded in the title of May el-Toukhy’s latest…
In 2025, among the best films of the year, at least according to this very outlet, was Lav Diaz’s Magellan. That work concluded along the…
Few filmmakers have confronted the fractures of modern America with such formal rigor and moral devotion as Barbara Kopple. For several decades, the legendary documentarian…
Looking back to the heyday of the New Queer Cinema movement that ruled the ’90s (the term itself was coined by film critic and scholar…
Because of its ability to replicate life, the cinema has long been a preferred medium for exploring the meaning of death. People die in films…
Identical twin sisters — so closely connected that they speak in unison, dream the same dreams, and furiously love the same man — dig a…
Film sets tend to be loud, full of people bustling around each other, in one breath bemoaning the lack of budget, materials, and film stock,…
Since I first reviewed Chronovisor in my Rotterdam coverage this past February, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s feature debut has become a miniature sensation. Not…
Before beginning production on Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock invited screenwriter Arthur Laurents to dinner with his wife Alma. The film’s star, Farley Granger, with whom…
There’s a category of media that takes juvenile gleefulness in tarnishing comforting and wholesome nostalgic imagery with violence, sex, and existential darkness. Early internet games…
Writing about Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, critic Ali Karimnia observes that it is “a cinema that, rather than telling us what the world is,…
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…