There’s a moment near the end of the first act of The Black Sea when Khalid (Derrick B. Harden), a Brooklynite stranded in the…
It’s a bold strategy, especially today, to go courting favor for a reactionary, conspiracy-minded, sexually repressed young man. Set aside the recent Presidential election…
Across three features Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most vital contemporary voices in American cinema. After the positive reception to…
By the time Miklós Jancsó made Red Psalm in 1972, he had already established his own allegorical mode of filmmaking. Stories of uprisings, movements,…
Sofia Bohdanowicz has always been a filmmaker unafraid to mine the uncomfortable depths of her own, and her family’s, history. Across 10 years of…
By now there’s little ground left to break within the Mockumentary genre, a fact only reinforced by Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight, a handsomely mounted…
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…
As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts…
Since his debut feature, Tower, 12 years ago, Kazik Radwanski’s tendency to foreground his characters’ inner turmoil has been matched, and perhaps maintained, by…
The decade-long collaboration between Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell has produced a fascinating cycle of films, including features and shorts, that goes some way…
Christopher Jason Bell has amassed an impressive filmography of shorts and features over the last 15 years, across which we can trace three key…
Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez premiered their new film, Invention, at Locarno last month, not quite sure what kind of life or reception it…
The dying days of French colonial rule are given ironically youthful life in Robin Campillo’s Red Island. Set in the early 1970s in Madagascar,…
Zach Clark’s films embody so many of the inspiring qualities of great low-budget filmmaking: scrappy, rough-and-ready production values stretched to feel more expensive than…
Monica Sorelle’s feature debut, Mountains, is refreshingly simple. It follows demolition worker Xavier (Abiton Nazaire), a Haitian immigrant living in the Little Haiti neighborhood…
It feels pointless to aim for some new insight in regard to Magnificent Obsession. As the title suggests, Sirk’s melodramas, particularly those he made…
Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age…
About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carrie(Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas…