In Tiger Stripes, Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature, a trio of twelve-year-old girls contend with the sudden and inexplicable physical changes that occur inside one…
Co-opting traditions as metaphors for the struggles of everyday life has always been cinema’s staple, either because these traditions romanticize the world or because they…
In contrast with the high-profile and ostentatious trappings of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which enmeshed the idiosyncrasies of genre with patent identity politics, Kit…
Your films have been widely described as having thematic preoccupations with the future and its anxieties, but at the same time they also are imbued…
What would Andrew Tate or the late Theodore J. Kaczynski make of Sasquatch Sunset? The litmus tests of this cinematic curio, which is more or…
Scarcity, meet self-interest: with the rising threat of ecological collapse and the persistent wherewithal to do little about it, dystopian scenarios have increasingly sought the…
With Yannick, filmmaker and absurdist Quentin Dupieux has synthesized the irreverent, a product of his usual gags and conceits, and the satirical, afforded by his…
“You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.” So declares May Bartram to John Marcher, both doomed lovers of Henry…
In an edition of surprises, programming eclecticism, and a refreshingly measured jury performance, Nicolas Philibert’s Golden Bear win for his latest documentary might yet prove…
Where do irony and sincerity stand today, both with respect to each other and to the cultural scene at large? A litmus test for endorsing…
A curious counterpoint to Celine Song’s much-lauded Past Lives may be found in Mimang, Kim Tae-yang’s feature debut, and the relative prestige of the former…
Speculative fiction tends to valorize the unreality of utopianism more than the concreteness of dystopian realism, and perhaps intuitively so: in the act of speculating,…
Much like Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift — whose audaciously hypnotic visuals and elliptical narrative heralded a major directorial presence — Anthony Chen’s third film,…
More exasperating than the woebegone premise of Olivia West Lloyd’s feature debut is the experience of actually watching it all unfold. The film limps along,…
For as long as the cinematic form has existed, it has embraced nostalgia, that cultural drug which oversees virtually every socio-political framework known to modern…
What do you get when you cross the clickbait sensibilities of TikTok with the winking ironies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? A confused predilection for…
The artifice of acting is almost always an unwelcome thing: draw too close to metafiction, and risk divorcing the spectator from the comforts of realism.…
In Rachel Lambert’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, the protagonist — a young office worker named Fran (Daisy Ridley) — leads a scheduled life both…
A lush, elemental reckoning unfurls across the relatively condensed runtime of Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s debut, The Settlers, even if few of its proceedings strictly qualify…
A major fear factor in horror stems from isolation, and its pervasive influence extends to both claustrophobic and agoraphobic conditions. Whether confined within a box…