History — personal, political, and its inseparable intertwinement — is, perhaps, most truthfully realized when vividly expressed, not just recorded. Documentarian greats like Ken Burns…
The Final Destination franchise is anything you want it to be. Its six not-so-varied variations of death engaging in a cruelly one-sided game of chess…
How does one definitively characterize a child’s point of view? Is it by positioning it as a response to the stultifying cynicism of adulthood, exemplified…
There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined oppressive…
It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe a…
Contemporary indie cinema may lack in quality, but it absolutely does not lack in the quantity of up-and-coming filmmakers majorly taking inspiration from the grainy…
In this day and age of IP-driven slopbusters, any film that dares to respond to a pre-existing intellectual property is worthy. Responding requires the filmmaker,…
Bollywood-sanctioned social-issue dramas — competently made, left-leaning rebuttals to some of the most incompetently made right-wing propagandist dramas — tend to prioritize fierce rebellion over…
“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power…
Whenever a film critic, especially one who has probably only played a very limited number of games in their life, argues that a film is…
Ever since making Dekalog in 1989, the monumental ten-hour-long Polish-language TV series consisting of one-hour episodes based on each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, director…
“This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening…
Claymation, most readily identified for its craggy, almost comedic artificiality, can, in fact, most truthfully express our deepest and, at times, darkest emotions. The four…
Once upon a time, the great François Truffaut said, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The details of when he said this, and…
At the end of the very first (of many) verbal arguments in Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters, an emotionally potent chamber drama about three estranged…
The increasingly ballooning runtimes of auteurist projects — specially made by those who belong to the ever-expanding School of Slow Cinema — inspire more anxiety…
Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a young…
All the markers of a classic Coen Brothers’ crime comedy are there in Potsy Ponciroli’s Greedy People — the third film released this year that…
In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First Reformed…