Director/cinematographer/co-writer Baatar Batsukh ends his new film Aberrance with a dedication to Darren Aronofsky, acknowledging the former indie darling/now-Academy Award-winning director’s influence on Batsukh’s own…
An artist and documentary filmmaker, Eléonore Saintagnan makes her feature debut with Camping du Lac, although such a biographical description does little to adequately describe…
Nicole Midori Woodford’s Last Shadow at First Light occupies an exasperating middle ground between heartfelt sincerity and hoary cliché, exploring generational trauma and survivor’s guilt…
Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside begins on an appropriately ominous note; the camera prowls down a dark hallway, blood-splattered on walls and bodies lying on…
Already an acclaimed editor on films such as Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light & Post Tenebras Lux and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, as well as an actress…
There are a few different films all struggling for screen time in Noah Collier & Emily MacKenzie’s new documentary Carpet Cowboys, including a treatise on…
Youssef Chebbi’s horror-tinged police procedural Ashkal (being released in the States officially as Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation) begins with a brief explanation of The Gardens of Carthage,…
Mother Lode straddles a few different lines in its depiction of the grueling lives of gold miners in the mountains of Peru. For all practical…
Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil takes the broad, familiar strokes of the revenge drama and fashions them into something altogether more tragic. The film…
In a recent think piece for Salon, critic Sam Adams asks “Where did all the hacks go?” He’s mainly talking about Disney’s penchant for foisting…
Ingenuous, low-budget sci-fi is having a moment. It’s been a long time since Primer and Upstream Color, or even Coherence or Timecrimes. But recent festival offerings like The Artifice Girl and Aporia suggest that…
Few directors have embodied the ethos of their own films quite so fully as Robert Aldrich; fiercely independent, constantly navigating the fickle vicissitudes of a…
As yet another Hong Sang-soo project makes the rounds, surely to be followed in four to six months by another, even newer film, it’s worth…
Cory Finely’s Landscape With Invisible Hand is an innocuous, flimsy little sci-fi movie, bandying about high concepts and reasonably detailed world-building but resolutely refusing to…
Jared Moshé’s Aporia is a rare thing indeed: a high-concept, hard sci-fi head-scratcher that still feels human-scaled thanks to sensitive performances and focus on familial…
Writing about Larry Fessenden’s new film Blackout, recently screened as part of the Fantasia Film Festival, we commented on its “shaggy structure” and noted that…
It’s not quite accurate to describe Darkness as magic realism, but it’s not strictly a genre piece, either. Much like the children at the story’s…
The history of the Western is fertile territory for studying many of the greatest American filmmakers of the 20th century. While none worked exclusively in…
Young filmmakers making gangster-adjacent genre films is a time-honored tradition — it’s a mode of moviemaking with a built-in propensity for ready-made conflict, violence, stylized…
It’s a shame that our contemporary film exhibition apparatus has no place for medium-length works like Alain Kassanda’s Trouble Sleep. At 40 minutes, it’s too…