A Far Shore
Japanese director Masaaki Kudo turns a compassionate eye on a 17-year-old nightclub hostess with a toddler, sent skidding toward prostitution in a heart-felt story set on Okinawa.
Karlovy Vary 2022
My Love Affair With Marriage
Signe Baumane’s animated feature is so brilliant in presenting a female perspective on love and marriage that you forgive its need to tell us the science behind romance.
In Broad Daylight
Ambiguity abounds in Emmanuel Tardif’s elusive Québécois drama about a family’s self-imposed isolation after an unexpected event and the spreading fractures in their fragile status quo.
You Have to Come and See It
Spanish director Jonas Trueba reunites his favorite actors for a 64-minute chamber piece, in a relaxed, engaging, free-wheeling exchange of moods and ideas between two 30-something couples.
Karlovy Vary: The Verdict
The masks were off and the parties were on at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (July 1-9) in a 56th edition brimming with street music, audiences hungry for edgy new movies and civilian crowds gaily mixing with festival-goers in what felt like the first real post-Covid film festival. Of course, it helped that the...
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Karlovy Vary 2022: The Awards
CRYSTAL GLOBE COMPETITION Grand Prix – Crystal Globe SUMMER WITH HOPE Directed by: Sadaf FOROUGHI Special Jury Prize YOU HAVE TO COME AND SEE IT Directed by: Jonás Trueba Best Director Beata PARKANOVA for WORD Best Actress (jointly awarded) Taki MUMLADZE and Mariam KHUNDADZE for A ROOM OF MY OWN Best Actor...
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Beautiful Beings
Cruel and delicate, this Icelandic drama shows troubled kids as the product of the actions and inactions of adults.
See You Friday, Robinson
Two cultural titans, Jean-Luc Godard and Ebrahim Golestan, exchange online messages in director Mitra Farahani’s scrappy but sporadically charming documentary ‘See You Friday, Robinson’.
Zoo Lock Down
Andreas Horvath’s observational documentary offers a different, meditative view of animals in captivity, whose uneventful lives without a human audience inevitably recall our own experience with the pandemic.
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
Director Nina Menkes attacks cinema’s long history of sexism, including some canonical male directors, in her timely and enjoyably polemical filmed lecture ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’.
Summer with Hope
Canadian-based filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi (‘Ava’, 2017) revisits the theme of teenage rebellion in middle-class Iran in a drama full of danger and nervous energy.
A Provincial Hospital
The Covid ward of a hospital in a town in western Bulgaria is the subject of this clear-eyed observational documentary about the perseverance of both its staff and patients.
Like a Fish on the Moon
Iranian director Dornaz Hajiha pushes maternal and paternal sentiment to anguishing extremes in an intriguing and intensely acted debut feature, but the ending is missing.
Silence 6-9
Actor-director Christos Passalis draws on his Greek Weird Wave roots for ‘Silence 6-9’. a cryptic but mostly impressive debut feature.
Art Talent Show
A wild documentary ride through the selection process at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where the teaching staff brainstorms to test the hidden talent of young applicants, and future artists do their best to make the undefined grade.
Borders of Love
A couple decide to broaden their sexual horizons with increasingly complicated results in Tomasz Winski’s knotty and intimate examination of honesty within relationship dynamics.
A Room of My Own
A young Georgian woman struggles to overcome stifling sexism and emotional trauma in director Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze’s worthy but muted chamber drama ‘A Room of My Own’.
You Won’t Be Alone
Noomi Rapace is among the moving female cast of Goran Stolevski’s Macedonian folk tale about blood-sucking, shape-shifting witches who offer body horror at its scariest, yet it’s also full of poetry, with a lot to say about women and life on Earth.
And Then There Was Love…
A woman seeks a fortune teller’s guidance about her ailing love life in this discursive but affecting portrait of generational trauma and self-love.
Fucking Bornholm
Polish director Anna Kazejak chronicles scenes from a collapsing marriage in her darkly comic holiday-from-hell psychodrama ‘Fucking Bornholm’.