One of the more indelible sequences in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breakthrough documentary, The Act of Killing, features one of its subjects, the Indonesian paramilitary thug…
In the opening moments of Nightbitch, director Marielle Heller appears alongside her star Amy Adams, both playing frustrated mothers in a grocery store. Both…
Andrea Arnold is not without talent, but she has some of the worst instincts of any allegedly major director. Take Fish Tank, for example.…
Xu Haofeng makes movies for people who enjoy and understand the finer points of martial arts choreography. His best-known film work (he’s also a…
Just shy of 10 years after winning an ill-deserved Palme d’Or for Dheepan (2015) — a leering intrusion into the lives of a makeshift…
Before making her feature film debut with 2019’s Atlantics, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop produced a series of poetic short films, all of which explored…
The title character of Sean Baker’s Anora notably does not go by that name for most of the film, and appears uncomfortable when male…
“Someone’s inside.” These two words, uttered with ominous clarity, spur Jason Yu’s invigorating debut, Sleep, into malevolent and mysterious somnolence; for in the world…
Pepe Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air…
Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel,…
While Taiwanese arthouse films have been regulars on the international festival circuit since the breakthroughs of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and the rest of…
Shot on grainy 16mm and scored by loopy, synth approximations of classical instruments, Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail sets up a dialectical…
Almost as if it were made in response to John Krasinski’s IF, a saccharine fantasy about a motherless young girl who through magical contortions was…
The notion of “camera-consciousness” in the cinema is not, on the face of it, a terribly plausible idea. Apart from point-of-view shots, or extended…
In his new film Being John Smith, premiering alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s for-real-this-time last two films in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, filmmaker John Smith starts with…
Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one…
Anora The title character of Sean Baker’s Anora notably does not go by that name for most of the film, and appears uncomfortable when…
Over the course of three seasons, I Think You Should Leave has cemented Tim Robinson as a genuinely iconic comedic performer. With episodes under…