It’s a sign of great writing when you can identify everything you love and hate about a character, but can’t decide whether you love or…
Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with…
In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to…
When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for a new anamorphic lens technology in 1952, whose origins dated back to a 1926 process called Anamorphoscope,…
As loglines go, a Chloë Sevigny-narrated, archive-heavy documentary about an infamous, largely discredited dolphin scientist has a kind of whimsical ring to it. And indeed,…
It’s hard to say how much genuine excitement there is for new Lord of the Rings properties. As the lukewarm reception to Amazon’s billion-dollar, multi-series…
It’s a bit of a shame that Kaveh Daneshmand’s new film Endless Summer Syndrome comes to us in the wake of Catharine Breillat’s Last Summer.…
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 port…
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 results,…
Across three features Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most vital contemporary voices in American cinema. After the positive reception to his…
By the time Miklós Jancsó made Red Psalm in 1972, he had already established his own allegorical mode of filmmaking. Stories of uprisings, movements, massacres,…
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 shorts…
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 biopic…
As he did in his directorial debut, the excellent Bones and Names (2023), Fabian Stumm mines the details of his own life and adapts them,…
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 his…
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 in…
Christopher Jason Bell has amassed an impressive filmography of shorts and features over the last 15 years, across which we can trace three key interests:…
Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez premiered their new film, Invention, at Locarno last month, not quite sure what kind of life or reception it would…
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, the…
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 they…