Although they are not programmed together at this year’s edition of FIDMarseille, it’s nonetheless intriguing to encounter Christine Baudillon’s Poetique de l’eau alongside Helena Wittmann’s A Thousand…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is our great purveyor of modern ennui, a chronicler of creeping existential dread as the world we have created now threatens to engulf…
One of the most interesting things that writer/director Christian Swegal does in his new film Sovereign is forgoing any introductory text scrawl or blatant exposition…
Thibault Emin’s Else begins with a series of undulating abstract images that suggest microscopic photography, a vaguely organic tapestry that evokes skin under a magnifying…
Filmmakers Will Howarth and Tom McKeith are walking a fine line with their new feature film In Vitro, a low-key dramatic thriller that incorporates horror-tinged…
For fans of a certain kind of action movie, Diablo is one of the most anticipated releases of 2025. It marks the sixth collaboration between…
There’s much to like about Victoria Franco’s Twelve Moons, a serious-minded drama about loss and addiction that avoids easy platitudes and simplistic moralizing. That is, until…
Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has directed 15 films in the last 12 years, a breakneck pace to rival even Hong Sang-soo. Not many seem to…
There’s a remarkable kind of alchemy at work in Hubert Charuel’s Meteors, an addiction story that transcends the typically staid strictures of the genre to…
Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done begins with a cryptic series of images; pitch-black night, a pile of discarded clothing, closeups of various faces, impassive…
There are so few solid, meat-and-potatoes American action films every year that get studio resources and an actual theatrical release that one is almost tempted…
The opening sequence of Gareth Evans’ new Netflix original Havoc — a hotly anticipated action epic from the director of the modern classic The Raid…
Alternating between icky-squishy horror, fish-out-of-water comedy, and doppelgänger abstraction, director Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic certainly lives up to its title. If the whole thing ultimately feels…
While the title gives the impression that this is an Asylum-style mockbuster ripping off the little-loved Brad Pitt-starring Bullet Train, the new Bullet Train Explosion…
In a recent interview with critic Carlos Aguilar, filmmaker Isaac Ezban recounts seeing Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth while in film school and being bowled…
A man wakes up on a crowded bus. He’s in a strange neighborhood, with no idea how he got there. He just wants to get…
Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player) Greta…
If the new indie neo-noir Gazer feels familiar, riffing on any number of classic thrillers as well as newer models like Memento and Too Late,…
One often encounters the (admittedly lazy) critical idea that a particular film “would’ve been better as a short,” suggesting that whatever ideas or formal attributes…
There’s an opaque yet stern quality to Kaloyan (Ognyan “Fyre” Pavlov), a heavily tattooed young man returning to his small Bulgarian hometown after many years…