February 12, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Indonesian director Kamila Andini’s gently feminist historical drama ‘Nana: Before, Now & Then’ is visually exquisite but tastefully timid.
February 12, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Australian rock duo Nick Cave and Warren Ellis bring their recent lockdown albums to life in Andrew Dominik’s handsome music documentary.
February 11, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Cult director Peter Strickland’s culinary art-world satire ‘Flux Gourmet’ is enjoyably weird but ultimately undercooked.
February 11, 2022
Stephen Dalton
French prankster Quentin Dupieux takes a detour into midlife melancholy with his latest gloriously absurd comic fable ‘Incredible but True’.
February 5, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Canadian filmmakers Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk pay tribute to Stan Brakhage, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Costa in an intriguing experimental exercise looking at the history of cinema and old-school political activism.
February 2, 2022
Stephen Dalton
French debutante director Morgane Dziurla-Petit returns to her home village for the playful and poignant docu-fiction hybrid Excess Will Save Us.
February 1, 2022
Jordan Mintzer
French auteur Jacques Doillon returns to form in this endearing, small-scale chronicle of abuse and friendship between two kids from different social classes.
January 31, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Retired pop star and former anarchist Dunstan Bruce tries to rekindle his youthful punk rage in the charmingly offbeat music documentary I Get Knocked Down.
January 25, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing’s first feature-length documentary offers a mellow and intimate portrait of two midwives – one a Buddhist, the other Muslim – who defy the deadly inter-communal conflict around them to become friends and health care providers for their poverty-stricken communities.
January 24, 2022
Deborah Young
Young American missionaries from the Church of the Latter-Day Saints set off to convert the dubious inhabitants of Finland in Tania Anderson’s paradoxical but respectful documentary.
January 24, 2022
Jordan Mintzer
This colorful portrait of a golden-aged Florida dance troupe doubles as a statement on friendship and female liberation.
January 21, 2022
Stephen Dalton
A masterful Bill Nighy, director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro relocate Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru to post-war London in the quietly powerful remake Living.
January 21, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Martika Ramirez Escobar’s audacious first feature is a maniacally meta love letter to Philippine cinema, but its films-within-a-film structure and nods to wildly different genres suffer from the lack of a substantial story.
January 19, 2022
Ben Nicholson
In his diaristic portrait of grief during the isolation of lockdown, Fabrizio Maltese has crafted a personal documentary full of universal poignancy.
January 12, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Belgium’s shortlisted entry for the 2022 Oscars is a remarkable examination of childhood, social belonging, and family ties—with implications outside of the school playground.
January 8, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Jessica Kingdon’s prize-winning, Oscar-shortlisted documentary Ascension is a disjointed but fascinating portrait of contemporary China as consumer capitalist superpower.
January 4, 2022
Jordan Mintzer
A keenly observed if somewhat underwhelming chronicle of divorce, and how it upends the life of a teenage girl.
December 31, 2021
Jay Weissberg
In his exploration of a man’s descent into madness during the present pandemic, director-actor Nejib Belkadhi makes a rare of-the-moment drama, inflected with humor and surrealism, that captures our unease in ways likely to outlast COVID’s grip on our psyches.
December 25, 2021
Deborah Young
Cheating on a high school exam for a good cause gives top Iraqi Kurdish writer and director Shawkat Amin Korki (‘Memories on Stone’) a fertile moral field to examine the traps surrounding female empowerment.
December 19, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Noomi Rapace stars in Iceland’s boldly original Oscar submission Lamb, a twisted folk-horror thriller about fantastic beasts and family trauma.
December 16, 2021
Jay Weissberg
What on the surface appears to be a formulaic road movie thriller about a couple of siblings tormented by a white Jeep on a desert road turns into a surprising critique of the Saudi old guard in which the younger generation declares its liberation from toxic patriarchy.
December 14, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
‘Waltz with Bashir’ director Ari Folman’s animated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary makes some valid points but takes a few too many creative liberties.
December 8, 2021
Jay Weissberg
Palestine’s 2022 Oscar submission is a brooding story of lives in limbo in the Golan Heights, stunningly shot and wrenching in its moving evocation of a man mired in self-loathing and paralyzed by the physical and existential no-man’s land resulting in the Israeli occupation and the disaster in Syria.
December 8, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
One of the best-selling instrumentalists of all time is both unaware and charming in Penny Lane’s engaging documentary.
December 4, 2021
Jay Weissberg
A well-calibrated debut with a fine central performance, weaving together notions of class and familial betrayal when an impoverished mother sells her son’s kidney to a well-off family in exchange for a better life.
November 23, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
In his skillfully helmed first feature, Isaac (Izaokas), Lithuanian writer-director Jurgis Matulevicius delves into his country’s turbulent past under both Communism and Nazism, following a trio of friends in the 1960s whose lives are overshadowed by a massacre that took place during WWII. Mixing historical fact with an existential crime story, the film is bathed […]
November 4, 2021
Patricia Boero
A sly, humorous take on the detective genre, set in a placid Uruguayan town where hidden passions rage.
November 3, 2021
Patricia Boero
In Io sto bene, Luxembourg’s submission to the Oscars, Donato Rotunno movingly chronicles how present-day Europe has become more diverse and tolerant, but still presents obstacles for new arrivals and leaves the elderly isolated and lonely. In one eloquent scene, an aging Italian immigrant visits his wife’s grave while a more recent arrival from Africa […]
October 16, 2021
Deborah Young
In the 19th century, a 14-year-old Danish girl struggles between her will and God’s in Tea Lindeburg’s impressionistic period drama, winner of the best director nod in San Sebastian.
October 14, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Nollywood’s most famous director has made a period piece for Netflix that, while good to look and with all the right politics for today, doesn’t quite come alive and yet stays on too long.
October 12, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
While still clearly finding their voice, three young Nigerian directors serve up entertaining vignettes of African life derived from popular made-in-Africa superstitions.
October 12, 2021
Clarence Tsui
Indian cineaste Aditya Vikram Sengupta delivers a slow-burning and delicate ensemble drama about the corrupted state of his hometown.
October 9, 2021
Patricia Boero
Raul Ramon’s first feature as a director is a sweet utopian fable that imagines a peaceful, united Mexico where solidarity and honesty prevail.
October 7, 2021
Patricia Boero
Quirky surprises abound in a stylish, suspenseful thriller set in 1970’s Argentina, when lesbians were persecuted and abortion was outlawed.
October 5, 2021
Deborah Young
The conservative new social order sidelines an old-school zookeeper in Emre Kayis’s closely observed, metaphoric first feature about Turkish society, winner of the Fipresci award in Toronto.
October 1, 2021
Patricia Boero
A complex, cryptic, compelling film in which Miguel Coyula’s surreal images portray a sci fi Cuba that attempts to mold young minds through genetic engineering.
September 28, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Slovakia’s former Oscars submission recreates the courageous real-life exploits of two Jewish prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz and alerted the world to the horrors of the Holocaust.
September 24, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
A good pitch, such as the one behind the French aviation thriller Black Box (Boîte noire), can only travel so far when the characters provide little fuel for the story. At some point, usually toward the middle of the second act, the movie stutters, stalls and then takes a nosedive, crashing well before the closing […]
September 10, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Partly inspired by real events, Otar’s Death is a fractious Georgian family drama with breathless thriller elements and a deep streak of black comedy.
September 8, 2021
Deborah Young
In a vividly dystopic 1938 Leningrad under Stalin’s Great Purge, a young NKVD torturer tries to save his soul, in co-directors Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov’s high-energy parable ‘Captain Volkonogov Escaped’.
September 5, 2021
Deborah Young
The controversy stirred up by Michel Franco’s previous film ‘New Order’ will be partly placated and partly reignited in ‘Sundown’, the story of English tourists (Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Mexico.
September 4, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke deliver an emotionally raw but refreshingly nuanced take on female desire.
September 4, 2021
Deborah Young
A girl’s exhilarating mind-trip through swinging London of the Sixties turns wild and woolly and full of zombies in ‘Last Night in Soho’, Edgar Wright’s multi-genre treat, co-starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie.
September 4, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Produced by Steve McQueen, Bianca Stigter’s experimental essay film is a rigorous exercise in forensic historical excavation commemorating Polish Holocaust victims.
September 1, 2021
Stephen Dalton
This cat-and-mouse chase thriller offers an opaque commentary on love as a form of psychosis and the paranoid political mood in post-Soviet Lithuania,
September 1, 2021
Jay Weissberg
The distinctive vision that Omar El Zohairy brought to his two prize-wining shorts is much in evidence in his meticulously crafted absurdist feature debut Feathers. It’s amusing to imagine how he pitched the project at the start, given the narrative’s unlikely elements: a working-class man is turned into a chicken during a private magic show […]
August 31, 2021
Stephen Dalton
The big prize-winner at Karlovy Vary film festival, As Far as I Can Walk is a modern migrant story with historic literary echoes.
