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 is…
In the tradition of Day for Night, Brazilian director Guto Parente’s new film Death and Life Madalena follows the production of a film beginning to…
In his first feature Conference of the Birds, director Amin Motallebzadeh borrows a title from a revered source: 12th-century Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar’s allegorical…
In his debut narrative feature, To a Land Unknown, Danish-Palestinian director and documentarian Mahdi Fleifel takes inspiration from New Hollywood films centering men on the…
Before effective treatment was available for HIV/AIDS, many understandably sought out cures outside of conventional medicine for the illness ravaging their bodies. Louise Hay, a…
Local, low-budget theatre demands enthusiastic commitment from its participants that almost always exceeds the profits and artistic achievements they can expect at the end of…
I Don’t Understand You, directed and written by married couple Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig, continually cashes in on the promise of its title.…
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen in a flash of color, sparkle, and song. With no exposition, or even opening credits, the…
Same-sex marriage was legalized in France in 2013, one of many countries to enshrine this right as law in the 2010s as the marriage equality…
In her feature-length directorial debut, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, writer-director Laura Piani effervescently manages the tricky task of bringing the deep emotionality and light…
The titular girl of The Girl in the Snow, director Louise Hémon’s debut feature, appears repeatedly as a dark silhouette. Clad in a black cloak…
The conceit of Nadia Conners’ The Uninvited brings to mind plays by the likes of Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter: a wealthy Los Angeles couple…
It’s not exactly a novel idea that many young queer people idealize pop divas to the point of over-identification, and it’s equally well-established culturally that…
The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism, unintended…
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend was a critical success — winning that year’s National Book Award for Fiction — that also managed to find…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences,…
Director Craig Johnson has worked with alums of Saturday Night Live before: His 2014 film The Skeleton Twins featured nuanced leading performances from Kristen Wiig…
The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and…
A few key components of Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down, his full-length directorial debut, may bring to mind another small-scale Irish drama that recently brought…
Writer-director Aaron Rookus’ film De Idylle (Dutch for Idyllic) presents an interconnected menagerie of death-haunted people — like all of us, they fear death, crave…