After the massive success of John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian in 1982, an avalanche of cheap sword-and-sorcery pictures flowed forth, eager to cash in on…
Hot on the heels of the exemplary Diablo, Scott Adkins, the hardest-working man in DTV action, is back with Prisoner of War. It’s a “big”…
Compulsion begins with a long, snaking POV tracking shot; we see only a pair of gloved hands as the camera enters a gated residence, scales…
Claire Simon’s new documentary portrait Writing Life – Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students is, for the most part, strikingly straightforward. Clocking…
If it ever gets proper distribution, Zoe Eisenberg’s new romantic drama Chaperone will surely generate several cycles of enervating discourse on Twitter; it’s rare that…
It takes a few minutes to realize that there hasn’t been a single edit in Hugo Ruíz’s new film, One Night With Adela, and then…
Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts with his…
With Short Summer, writer/director Nastia Korkia has created an exquisite, evocative portrait of a rapidly disintegrating world told almost entirely through the eyes of a child.…
Director David Mackenzie has had a fascinating career; in the past, we’d likely consider him a talented journeyman, the sort of solid professional who can…
If you spend any time online, you’ve likely heard Quentin Tarantino wax poetic about making his tenth and, so he says, final film, a quixotic…
Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been…
Writer/director Brandon Daley is juggling a couple of very disparate tones in his new film $POSITIONS, an absurdist comedy that gradually transforms into a white-knuckle…
Setting one’s low-budget genre film in a single setting is a time-honored tradition, a money-saving maneuver that makes for a simple calling-card exercise but which…
In a world completely in thrall to corporate IP and mega-budget computerized imperialist fantasies, we should be eternally grateful to festivals like Fantasia for platforming…
There’s a heavy, somber pallor that hangs over To Kill a Wolf, writer/director Kelsey Taylor’s debut feature. Working with cinematographer Adam Lee, Taylor films the…
Helena Wittmann is likely best known for her feature-length narrative films Drift and Human Flowers of Flesh, but she has been making small-scale, idiosyncratic shorts for over…
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…