Sex and love don’t always make for ideal bedmates, and the strain one places on the other is at the heart of Swiss writer-director Jan Gassmann’s latest feature, 99 Moons. Provocative but also thought-provoking, this story of a couple that meets through a Tinder-like...
Clément Cogitore is less known in France as a feature filmmaker than as young and highly coveted visual artist, with shorts like the Siberia-set documentary, Braguino, and the crunk dance battle/opera piece Les Indes galantes — both released in 2017 — sealing his...
Death hovers over director Emily Atef’s fifth feature, More Than Ever (Plus Que Jamais), in unsettling ways. First, it fuels this solemn and emotionally gripping story about a woman in a relationship who's diagnosed with a rare lung disease and faced with her imminent...
The second feature as a director from in-demand screenwriter Léa Mysius tries to be about five different films at once, and ends up being one right mess.
Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s mix of beauty and bombast makes a donkey of a promising premise of making audiences observe a chaotic, cruel world through a braying animal’s eyes.
Writer-director Lola Quivoron’s debut, Rodeo, belongs to a recent class of French films made by and about young women, with stories that combine the coming-of-age genre — what the French call un film d’initiation — with elements of a Hollywood thriller or horror...
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED ON OCT. 25, 2021 Elie Grappe’s sober drama about a teenaged Ukrainian gymnast sent abroad for her safety mixes sports and politics with coming-of-age elements, and represented Switzerland in the Oscar race.
This frequently perplexing sci-fi musical has a lot to say about the politics of race, but its true triumph is its music and gorgeous visuals.
An insightful exploration of youth, ambition, romance, and meaning through the lens of a young woman you both identify with and love to hate.
Winner of the Academy Award for best international feature, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s story of how love survives death is a long, measured, ultimately mesmerizing examination of the human soul.
Noomi Rapace stars in Iceland’s boldly original Oscar submission Lamb, a twisted folk-horror thriller about fantastic beasts and family trauma.
A haunting low-fi meditation on memory, social class and political protest that won the Golden Eye documentary award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
‘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.
France’s most famous rap duo gets an energized if standardized biopic in this first of two projects to tackle the legacy of hip-hop group Suprême NTM.
A high-end gay sex worker in China longs for the family affection he felt as a child in C.B. Yi’s beautifully crafted if not always satisfying debut that showcases the talents of actor Kai Ko.
A gloriously extreme Oscar submission, French writer-director Julia Ducournau’s prize-winning erotic thriller about a gender-blurring serial killer with a fetish for sex with cars is funny, fast and furious.
Feted Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s latest Oscar contender is a classy but underpowered drama about moral complexity and social media shaming.
Rahul Jain follows up his festival mega-hit ‘Machines’ with an apocalyptic vision of Delhi’s life-threatening pollution that floods the screen with present-day disasters.
Costa Rica dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya gives an eerie, riveting perf but it only goes so far in this unstructured tale of magic realism and female power from debuting director Nathalie Alvarez Mesen.
You can’t say no to a relationship this mismatched in Juho Kuosmanen’s warm-hearted but melancholy voyage to nowhere, starring Russian actor of the moment Yuriy Borisov and Seidi Haarla as the Finnish tourist who stumbles across him.
‘Murina’, which won this year’s Camera d’Or in Cannes for first-time director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic, extols female rebellion but walks a dangerous tightrope connecting the male gaze with the body of a rebellious 17-year-old girl.
A beautifully textured travel diary disguised as a highly personal quest — or is it the other way around? Either way, Mariner of the Mountains (Marinheiro das Montanhas) from director Karim Aïnouz — whose swoony feminist melodrama The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão...
There are so many good ideas in Leyla Bouzid’s second feature A Tale of Love and Desire, so many rarely-addressed issues deserving attention, that it’s especially frustrating how faintly the sparks fly between her two main characters, university classmates at the...
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...
Onoda Hiroo was the name of the famous Japanese soldier who refused to believe that WWII had ended, so he remained in hiding on a sparsely populated island in the Philippines for almost three decades. His story of endurance, as impressive as it is insane and as...
Over the past decade or so, the French city of Marseille has worked hard to clean up its image, gentrifying a significant area around its touristy Vieux-Port, opening a brand new museum and conference center — both architectural marvels — and attracting a swatch of...
Claire Denis sublimely explored the sweaty, dust-coated bodies of French legionnaires in one of her best movies, Beau Travail, which focused on a platoon of lonesome fighters marooned at a remote outpost in East Africa. In Our Men (Mon légionnaire), the second feature...
Sex and love don’t always make for ideal bedmates, and the strain one places on the other is at the heart of Swiss writer-director Jan Gassmann’s latest feature, 99 Moons. Provocative but also thought-provoking, this story of a couple that meets through a Tinder-like...
Clément Cogitore is less known in France as a feature filmmaker than as young and highly coveted visual artist, with shorts like the Siberia-set documentary, Braguino, and the crunk dance battle/opera piece Les Indes galantes — both released in 2017 — sealing his...
Death hovers over director Emily Atef’s fifth feature, More Than Ever (Plus Que Jamais), in unsettling ways. First, it fuels this solemn and emotionally gripping story about a woman in a relationship who's diagnosed with a rare lung disease and faced with her imminent...
The second feature as a director from in-demand screenwriter Léa Mysius tries to be about five different films at once, and ends up being one right mess.
Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s mix of beauty and bombast makes a donkey of a promising premise of making audiences observe a chaotic, cruel world through a braying animal’s eyes.
Writer-director Lola Quivoron’s debut, Rodeo, belongs to a recent class of French films made by and about young women, with stories that combine the coming-of-age genre — what the French call un film d’initiation — with elements of a Hollywood thriller or horror...
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED ON OCT. 25, 2021 Elie Grappe’s sober drama about a teenaged Ukrainian gymnast sent abroad for her safety mixes sports and politics with coming-of-age elements, and represented Switzerland in the Oscar race.
This frequently perplexing sci-fi musical has a lot to say about the politics of race, but its true triumph is its music and gorgeous visuals.
An insightful exploration of youth, ambition, romance, and meaning through the lens of a young woman you both identify with and love to hate.
Winner of the Academy Award for best international feature, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s story of how love survives death is a long, measured, ultimately mesmerizing examination of the human soul.