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…
One could argue that it speaks to the humanistic timelessness of The Bicycle Thieves that it just keeps getting remade, with the circumstances adapted to…
The first of this year’s Wavelengths short film programs begins, appropriately enough, with Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, a 2016 work by Tomonari…
Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has…
Russian luminary Alexander Sokurov delivers another curveball. Following Fairytale, his 2022 animated feature about notorious leaders of the 20th century languishing in purgatory, Sokurov offers…
Unlike the big three international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin), Locarno does not traditionally feel an obligation to elevate domestic product into its competition.…
It’s always fortuitous for a documentary filmmaker to find themselves able to capture seismic historical shifts as they are happening. But of course, this is…
In her first feature-length, solo directorial outing, Maureen Fazendeiro poses one of the most fundamental cinematic questions: how can we depict time? In 2021’s The…
Filmmakers working under the constraints of an oppressive regime must become very good at leaving things unsaid. The main ideas are often relegated to the…
Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed…
It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for…
Following Pacifiction, his seventh and most technically elaborate narrative film, Albert Serra did something unexpected: he produced his first full-length documentary. Afternoons of Solitude is…
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s new film can only be described as experimental. It doesn’t just explore the legacy of Martinican writer Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, an intellectual whose ideas…
If you know anything at all about French director François Ozon, then you realize just how little we know about him. Sure, we have all…
Quebecois director Denis Côté is something of a cinematic explorer. Over the course of his 25-year career, he has established himself as one of Canada’s…
In 2014, the Dutch filmmaking duo of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan made a film called Episode of the Sea, collaborating with the…
Brigid McCaffrey’s debut feature plays very much like a pleasant walk in the woods. One is surrounded by the hazy glint of sunlight on foliage,…
Sinhalese filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe has been making exquisite short films for the past several years, works that hold out the suggestion of narrative meaning but…
In her fifth feature film, Turkish director Pelin Esmer adopts a self-reflexive approach to storytelling. While the attempt is admirable and occasionally intriguing, And the…
This time last year, few would have expected that we’d spend the end of 2024 relitigating Robbie Williams. But the release of Better Man has…
Six years ago, Mike Leigh produced his first war film, Peterloo, in which domestic unrest in 1819 led British troops to slaughter protesting civilians. At…