It would be an exaggeration to call Julia Loktev’s previous documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, a smash hit. Clocking…
German director Luise Donschen follows her own path, to put it mildly. Her 2018 debut feature, Casanova Gene, was a daring conceptual project that, in…
Even among the film festival cognoscenti, experimental films sometimes inspire their fair share of confusion. This is to be expected, since the films in question…
It’s taken a while for cinephiles (including this writer) to catch up with the Vienna-based filmmaking duo of Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel. Their profile…
“Is there even a suspect? Is there even a crime?” These words spoken by Detective Mijares (Alchris Galura) are as good a summation as you’re…
Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun has staked out a strong, consistent ethic across his career. His films champion the cause of the outcast, the foreigner, the…
Is it possible for an entire nation to have an inside joke? Manitoba-based filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s brilliant new film Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney zeroes…
Toronto-based filmmaker Yuula Benivolski has made several impressive short films, the most recent of which, why I never became a driver, played several experimental film…
Powwow People, the new documentary from Ho-Chunk / Pechanga director Sky Hopinka is somewhat more straightforward than the experimental filmmaking that first gained Hopinka notoriety.…
Argentinean director Benjamín Naishtat garnered notice about 15 years ago, primarily with a trio of innovative, highly unusual feature films. 2014’s History of Fear was a nearly abstract nocturne focused on the various ways that a society can break down, turning its participants against one another. On a meta-level, it was about the different ways
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Hungarian writer-director Gábor Reisz garnered significant notice on the festival circuit for his third feature film, 2023’s Explanation for Everything. That film was a pointed…
Because of its ability to replicate life, the cinema has long been a preferred medium for exploring the meaning of death. People die in films…
As usual, a specter is haunting the art world, and the newest one wears a lot of different faces. AI-generated imagery is the place where…
Italian filmmaker Riccardo Giacconi has been making experimental documentaries for the past 15 years. Possibly his best-known film to date is Two (2017), a medium-length…
Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s last film, 2023’s Green Border, was a fact-based drama about migrants who were lured to Belarus by false promises of asylum,…
An undeniably audacious film, Ann Oren’s Objet a is also actively irksome. At the risk of coming across as condescending, this is the sort of…
Cinema has a unique capacity for depicting time, as we all know. But this plasticity — turning “time” into a physical ribbon of pictures and…
The critical concept of intersectionality, like “wokeness” or “critical race theory,” has been evacuated of its actual meaning by bad-faith bloggers and the conservative commentariat.…
American independent filmmaker and cinematographer Rob Tregenza broke onto the scene with 1988’s Talking to Strangers, a somewhat Jarmuschian dramedy that was notable for being…
Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke is a delight, a playful formalist in a sea of self-serious festival auteurs. But because comedy is often viewed askance by…
Australian writer-director Alice Maio Mackay is not quite 22 years old, and now has seven feature-length productions under her belt. But there’s often a downside…