Sermon to the Void Amid a churning torrent of acid gold, Hilal Baydarov’s Sermon to the Void unveils its true form, slipping away from its…
The Currents A woman, beautiful and a touch removed, travels to Switzerland from Argentina to accept an award. She throws the glass statuette in the…
Mile End Kicks Having decided myself to migrate from a Toronto suburb to Montreal in my young adulthood shortly after hearing Visions for the first…
A Private Life A visual motif that reoccurs throughout Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest film, A Private Life, is a spiral staircase. Beyond being chic and Parisian…
Back Home Tsai Ming-liang ‘s latest sketchbook entry concerns his frequent star and collaborator Anong Houngheuangsy returning to his village in Laos, where he interacts…
The August dog days of cinema’s summer season are typically filled with second-rate tentpoles and mid-sized studio fare designed to capitalize on undiscerning audiences looking…
A House of Dynamite For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how…
Jay Kelly A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that…
Recently, an organization called Third Way, comprised of conservative Democrats and their corporate donors, sent out a list of “forbidden terms” that people on the…
The Plant from the Canaries The canary, a songbird of the finch family, occupies an eminent place in avian symbolism, not least for its melodious…
The Dead of Winter The cold is often a conduit for ardent symbolism, whether in the frozen recesses of repressed memories or in the merciless…
Dry Leaf Seeking to reduce a filmmaker’s chief thematic preoccupation is usually a waste of time, for any one worth their stuff works in a…
Obex One of the least consequential but more intriguing facets of our age of technology acceleration is watching which flavor of tech nostalgia will be…
Blue Heron Sophy Romvari has used cinema to mine the fractured, seemingly incomplete nature of her family history since her first short film, Nine Behind.…
Flush 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…
Sham If anyone can make a great Cancel Culture movie, it would have to be Takashi Miike, right? Sham is based on a true story,…
On paper, July was — and is usually — a month earmarked for studios to make their mint, with blockbusters of varying quality demanding half…
Together In Michael Shanks’ body-horror-comedy Together, the recently-engaged but longtime-dating couple of Millie and Tim (played by real-life spouses and frequent creative collaborators Alison Brie…
Lilim An overwhelming sense of familiarity clings to Mikhail Red’s Lilim, which liberally deploys Gothic and folk horror tropes without grasping their inherent power. The…
Queerpanorama Writer-director Jun Li received a degree in journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in his self-referential film Queerpanorama, the journalistic impulse…