For the first time in his feature career, Cristian Mungiu has shifted his critical gaze from Romania to its western neighbors. A Cannes luminary par…
Long before Russia commenced its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the winter of 2022, preeminent cineast Andrey Zvyagintsev already saw dark clouds gathering over his…
Sometimes the first shot of a film tells you enough to know you’re in the hands of a great director. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown —…
Harmony Korine gleefully threw genre cinema in the deep fryer with the hitman miasma of Aggro Dr1ft (2023). This year, Nicolas Winding Refn took it…
Surely critics will be quick to note that The Beloved (El ser querido) strongly recalls last year’s Sentimental Value, as Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s seventh feature film…
As someone whose first airplane experience was a slightly traumatic flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis not long after 9/11, it was a perplexing experience to…
A great way to insult the Circassian men in Butterfly Jam is to say they’re weak. Even worse is to call them a “pussy.” Somewhat…
“There is a hole in the lake where the movies come from” is one of those incredible lines that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp…
More than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and over a decade after the annexation of Crimea, a desire to put the inner…
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, except for Leos Carax’s bizarro musical Annette (2021), the last decade of the Cannes Film Festival has boasted some…
Although cinema is at its best when it gleefully breaks the rules, some operating procedures need to be in place when you embark upon an…
Two things can be true at once — a simple fact of life many folks still struggle to accept. Even with his reputation perpetually tarnished…
If Peter Farrelly acquired any auteurist pretensions after undeservedly winning the Oscar for Best Picture with his insincere race-relations road movie Green Book (2018), he…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…
Immersing yourself in a new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is akin to reluctantly catching up with an old friend. As of late, there’s…
A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies…
For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how so few contemporary filmmakers…
With the ever prolific Romanian auteur delivering banger after banger at breakneck speed, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that 2025 is another…
Karl Marx’ oft-cited quip about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce,” could easily apply to Special Operation, Oleksiy Radynski’s…
It all starts with a bang. Sirât immerses itself into a spectacular DIY rave in the Moroccan desert, before its narrative kicks off proper. Engulfed…
In the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, a Kyiv-based auditorium turns into an ad hoc military classroom. Civilians take turns…