February 16, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Hong Sang-soo’s 27th feature, and his third in competition in Berlin in as many years, offers his trademark acerbic humor, anchored by veteran Korean actress Lee Hye-young’s caustic turn as an embittered writer.
February 15, 2022
Deborah Young
On his first completely solo flight directing without his late brother, Paolo Taviani pays a stirring salute to Sicily’s great novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello.
February 13, 2022
Clarence Tsui
An anonymous collective of Burmese filmmakers delivers a powerful statement of defiance against the murderous military dictatorship that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government on February 1, 2021.
February 12, 2022
Stephen Dalton
French screen heavyweights Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon trade bruising blows in ‘Both Sides of the Blade’, a conventional but gripping love-triangle drama from veteran Gallic auteur Claire Denis.
February 11, 2022
Jay Weissberg
Egyptian queer experimental cinema comes into its own with this playful, visually inventive sex-positive short feature that repurposes “One Thousand and One Nights” using gay Arab cultural signifiers.
February 8, 2022
Stephen Dalton
A young woman struggles to process personal trauma and wider social injustice in Norwegian director Anders Emblem’s slender but quietly haunting drama A Human Position,
February 5, 2022
Stephen Dalton
French director Mabrouk El Mechri’s screwball action comedy about domestic violence, Kung Fu Zohra is admirably audacious but misses the target.
February 3, 2022
Jay Weissberg
The vestiges of politically-instigated past trauma come back to trouble an older couple in their second marriage as they begin ruminating on their demise in Gao Linyang’s subtly crafted, detail and performance driven feature debut.
February 1, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Gessica Geneus’s debut feature is a superb meditation on sisterhood, motherhood, and what it means to love a failing nation.
January 31, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Focusing on the plight of both working-class locals and migrant labourers in a small town, Juichiro Yamasaki’s third feature powerful chronicles the greying fortunes of Japan’s depopulated provinces.
January 26, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
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.
January 25, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
‘Babysitter’ steers clear of preachiness in its half-scolding and often amusing examination of sexual and sexist attitudes in the wake of #MeToo.
January 22, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Director Kathryn Ferguson’s engaging music documentary Nothing Compares explores Sinéad O’Connor’s legacy as both icon and iconoclast, with input from the scandalous singer herself.
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 20, 2022
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
An insightful exploration of youth, ambition, romance, and meaning through the lens of a young woman you both identify with and love to hate.
January 14, 2022
Stephen Dalton
Originally reviewed Oct. 12, 2021 – NOW ON APPLE TV Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand and a solo Joel Coen turn Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty classic Macbeth into a ravishingly beautiful game of thrones.
January 9, 2022
Clarence Tsui
Boasting stunning imagery and a great back story, Bhutan’s first film to make the Oscar shortlist works a well-trodden premise into a beautiful, humanist and accessible picture.
January 7, 2022
Stephen Dalton
George Clooney directs Ben Affleck in The Tender Bar, a warm-hearted but flat coming-of-age drama.
January 5, 2022
Jay Weissberg
The unsettled protagonists of Hamzah Jamjoom’s “Rupture” seem to be literally pulled through past, present and future in this Italian-inspired thriller in which a woman’s sanity is disturbed by her pregnancy and a malevolent concierge (played by Billy Zane) with his own unsavory baggage.
January 4, 2022
Deborah Young
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel ‘The Lost Daughter’ strays too far from Italy to be convincing, but a stunningly good Olivia Colman saves the day.
December 30, 2021
Patricia Boero
Panama’s Oscar-shortlisted drama eloquently portrays class divides, as a bereaved upper-class architect seeks redemption in her friendship with a homeless, street-smart boy.
December 24, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Denmark’s shortlisted Oscar contender Flee is a warmly personal animated coming-of-age documentary about an Afghan refugee coming to terms with his sexuality and painful family history.
December 18, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
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.
December 6, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Director Adam Donen’s messy but ambitious debut feature Alice, Through the Looking brings together Lewis Carroll, Jean-Luc Godard and Monty Python in a hellish post-Brexit London.
December 5, 2021
Stephen Dalton
A Chilean family sail into stormy waters in director Nicolás Postiglione’s tense, gripping, politically charged suspense thriller Immersion.
December 2, 2021
Deborah Young
Jane Campion’s bold cinematic interpretation of Thomas Savage’s novel about cattle ranchers in 1920’s Montana is a sensuous, aestheticized Netflix release, whose meticulous detail and gay subplot are admirable but a little tiring.
November 24, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Mali-born filmmaker Seydou Cissé comes at the theme of African immigration through the lens of spirituality.
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 17, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
Filled with enough gyrating dead corpses to cast the next Zack Snyder movie several times over, director Péter Bergendy’s Hungarian horror flick Post Mortem is high on gore and jump scares, low on convincing storytelling and originality. It displays a solid level of craft, especially the heavy use of visual and makeup effects, but otherwise […]
November 12, 2021
Deborah Young
Bahman Ghobadi’s latest Kurdish story, shot in Istanbul, hovers between tragedy and humor without hitting the emotional high note it aims for.
November 4, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Moumouni Sanou’s award-winning documentary about the reality of working girls in Burkina Faso is marred by its lack of discretion.
November 3, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Feted Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s latest Oscar contender is a classy but underpowered drama about moral complexity and social media shaming.
November 1, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
A Ghanaian woman makes an anti-migration decision her friends and family disagree with.
October 25, 2021
Stephen Dalton
Controversial LA musician Annie Hardy plays an obnoxious American tourist battling demonic forces in the English countryside in director Rob Savage’s profane, provocative, hilarious found-footage horror comedy Dashcam.
October 23, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese has made a masterpiece that showcases the great talent of the late Mary Twala and announces his own genius.
October 21, 2021
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo
Chuko and Ari Esiri’s Eyimofe, which is competing at Fespaco, combines two semi-overlapping stories of Nigerians on the edge. The first story is titled Spain, the second Italy. The idea in both titles is destination. In both stories, the Nigerian characters have come to believe that another life, one of happiness and devoid of material lack, […]
October 19, 2021
Jordan Mintzer
You don’t need to hold a doctorate in Freudian psychology, or to have labored through all 750 pages of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, to know that big towers built by ambitious men usually are, in one way or another, substitutes for their penises. And yet, in the highly romanticized biopic Eiffel, director Martin Bouboulon spends […]
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.
September 28, 2021
Deborah Young
Three little girls grow up in a village terrorized by the drug cartels in Tatiana Huezo’s dreamy and terrifying first feature, which won San Sebastian’s Latin Horizons crown.
September 25, 2021
Deborah Young
Trapped in a violent family, a young woman rebels in Alina Grigore’s assured and absorbing first feature, another gift from contemporary Romanian cinema.
September 18, 2021
Deborah Young
The life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon movingly expresses the traumas of war and love in one of writer-director Terence Davies’ finest creations.
September 14, 2021
Stephen Dalton
A wealthy young Polish couple are forced to confront their own moral bankruptcy during a luxury Italian vacation in Silent Land, Aga Woszczy?ska’s elegantly bleak exploration of First World Problems.
September 6, 2021
Deborah Young
ORIGINALLY REVIEWED SEPT. 7, 2021 Ukrainian filmmaker Valentyn Vasyanovych follows up his Venice Horizons-winning ‘Atlantis’ with ‘Reflection’ (‘Vidblysk’), a perturbing true horror tale of his country’s war with Russia.
