Cristian Mungiu’s excoriation of xenophobia in multiethnic Transylvania is a classic example of the director’s dedication to naturalism and boasts several superb sequences, but it tries a bit too hard to encompass more topics than it can comfortably handle.
Mikko Myllylahti’s impressive debut feature is a poetic and perplexing look at a man facing the diminishing of his life’s work with otherworldly stoicism.
Director Emmanuel Nicot’s assured debut feature ‘Love According to Dalva’ navigates dark subject matter with compassion, warmth and great performances.
Léa Seydoux stars in feted French auteur Mia Hansen-Løve’s slender autobiographical rumination on love and loss ‘One Fine Morning’.
Emily Watson plays a troubled Irish matriarch in ‘God’s Children’ a handsome but heavy-handed family psychodrama from directing duo Seala Davis and Anna Rose Holmer.
Pietro Marcello’s disappointing follow-up to “Martin Eden” combines uncharacteristically saccharine visuals with a weak narrative and treacly score.
Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton look back on their ground-breaking feminist comedy hit ‘9 to 5’ in this timely documentary from directors Camille Hardman and Gary Lane.
Toronto photographer Louie Palu’s unstructured yet immersive trip into the Donbas war zones in 2016 makes a skin-crawling intro to the current invasion of Ukraine.
Hossein Tehrani’s gently melancholy first feature about poor farm laborers, which won Tokyo’s Asian Future competition, reveals a strong new Iranian voice.
The age-old Faroe Islands tradition of slaughtering pilot whales for their tasty meat gets pushback from animal rights activists in a documentary that raises more complex questions.
Éric Baudelaire riffs on the music and musical sensibility of Alvin Curran in this absorbing archival documentary about the revolutionary fervour of mid-century Rome.
A phenomenal archive of cataclysmic imagery is the main attraction in Sara Dosa’s doc about star-crossed volcanologists, but it’s also imbued with their zeal.
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED OCT. 13, 2021 Kenneth Branagh won the Academy Award for best original screenplay for this warm, funny, visually sumptuous autobiographical drama.
Iranian filmmaker Faeze Azizkhani portrays the hazards of making a movie about yourself in a self-referential drama packed with anxiety and irony.
Sonita Gale’s documentary is an important examination of Britain’s devastating immigration practices over several decades.
Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s prize-winning debut feature ‘You Are Not My Mother’ is a rich witches’ brew of psychological horror, social realism and creepy Celtic folklore.
A career-spanning documentary on Norway’s most successful pop band, ‘A-ha: The Movie’ is an earnest but mostly absorbing study of fame, friendship and midlife angst.
A emotionally fragile schoolgirl spends a revelatory summer with foster parents in director Colm Bairéad’s haunting, prize-winning, Irish-language debut feature.
Debuting director Flávia Neves throws far too many elements into her overstuffed Gothic-tinged plot, intriguing enough to hold attention but too convoluted to withstand criticism.
Cyril Schäublin’s Berlin prize-winner ‘Unrest’ is a playful, gently subversive, precision-tooled drama about anarchist watch-makers in 19th century Switzerland.
The band of rowdy construction workers at the heart of Serbian director Milos Pusic’s dark new dramedy are not your typical Working Class Heroes, and the film’s title is meant to be taken somewhat ironically, or at least with a sizeable grain of salt. They are, however, the victims of a corrupt system that starts […]
The rapidly changing social mores in Iran are highlighted in the dilemma of a single mother and her baby, directed by Ali Asgari with thriller-like tension.
Another documentary subtly but clearly discouraging African migration, with the good sense to find camera-friendly subjects who imbue the film’s trite theme with humour and energy.
Maggie Peren’s evocation of young, reckless Jewish forger Cioma Schönhaus during the dark days of Hitler’s Berlin is strong on physical atmosphere but can’t balance his devil-may-care spunk with a sense of what awaits should he be caught
French director Mikhaël Hers falls short of his Rohmer-esque ambitions in ‘Passengers of the Night’, a sprawling family drama set in 1980s Paris.
A joyful, transgressively liberating ode to cinema and the way an unexpected passion can make societal barriers disappear, Nicolette Krebitz’s intelligently written and expertly crafted love story about an older woman and a much younger man is a delight.
Indonesian director Kamila Andini’s gently feminist historical drama ‘Nana: Before, Now & Then’ is visually exquisite but tastefully timid.
Australian rock duo Nick Cave and Warren Ellis bring their recent lockdown albums to life in Andrew Dominik’s handsome music documentary.
Cult director Peter Strickland’s culinary art-world satire ‘Flux Gourmet’ is enjoyably weird but ultimately undercooked.
French prankster Quentin Dupieux takes a detour into midlife melancholy with his latest gloriously absurd comic fable ‘Incredible but True’.
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.
French debutante director Morgane Dziurla-Petit returns to her home village for the playful and poignant docu-fiction hybrid Excess Will Save Us.
French auteur Jacques Doillon returns to form in this endearing, small-scale chronicle of abuse and friendship between two kids from different social classes.
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.
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.
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.
This colorful portrait of a golden-aged Florida dance troupe doubles as a statement on friendship and female liberation.
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.
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.
In his diaristic portrait of grief during the isolation of lockdown, Fabrizio Maltese has crafted a personal documentary full of universal poignancy.
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.
Jessica Kingdon’s prize-winning, Oscar-shortlisted documentary Ascension is a disjointed but fascinating portrait of contemporary China as consumer capitalist superpower.
A keenly observed if somewhat underwhelming chronicle of divorce, and how it upends the life of a teenage girl.
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.
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.
Noomi Rapace stars in Iceland’s boldly original Oscar submission Lamb, a twisted folk-horror thriller about fantastic beasts and family trauma.
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.
‘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.
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.
One of the best-selling instrumentalists of all time is both unaware and charming in Penny Lane’s engaging documentary.