Italian Studies Dislocation and dissociation lie at the heart of Italian Studies, a work straddling narrative and documentary, identified precisely through its rejection of stable,…
All These Sons Filmmaker Bing Liu became a notable name quite suddenly in 2018 when his feature debut Minding the Gap premiered at Sundance, going…
The Beta Test Over the course of now three feature films, Jim Cummings has established himself as the premier chronicler of a very contemporary, very…
The once-industrial, now student-populated city of Sheffield plays host, each year, to the UK’s biggest and most prestigious documentary festival. Sheffield Doc/Fest is a week-long…
As one of many early-year festivals that was forced to cancel its 2020 edition, Tribeca returns in 2021, brimming with more titles than ever thanks…
Poupelle of Chimney Town At this point, it’s fairly useless to ascribe Studio Ghibli qualities to any new anime release, so diluted have such comparisons…
Scarecrow Something incredible is brewing in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Over the last twenty years, this large yet sparsely-populated territory situated in the far-flung and…
IFFR returns this week, a short couple months after its last iteration. As a response to the pandemic, IFFR 2021 decided to split itself a…
Heaven Reaches Down to Earth Tebogo Malebogo’s Heaven Reaches Down to Earth begins with red embers dancing. Their subtle flickers, alongside the pulsing buzz of…
Dark Red Forest Spiritual faith, by virtue of its abstract and elusive qualities, rarely translates well to the visual medium, if indeed it can be…
El Planeta This year, New Directors/New Films opens with Amalia Ulman’s debut feature film El Planeta, a cool choice for MoMA and Film at Lincoln…
It’s been only a short four months since the postponed 2020 edition of New Directors/New Films wrapped up, but the fest is back on schedule…
Between Dog and Wolf In Irene Gutiérrez’s Between Dog and Wolf, the relationship between past and present — and future — is vertiginous. We are…
The Spine of Night The Spine of Night is a whole lot of movie. Despite the film’s relatively straightforward fantasy logline — sorcerer goes mad…
Fucking with Nobody For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director Hannaleena Hauru opts to play an on-screen alter-ego of herself. Hanna is a…
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched In 2012, writer and film programmer Kier-La Janisse published House of Psychotic Women, a tremendous and essential text, part autobiography,…
Gaia There’s an ancient, malevolent force living in the depths of the forest in director Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia, a psychedelic bit of eco-horror that finds nature…
After being forced to cancel 2020’s festival in the eleventh hour in the wake of Covid’s proliferation across the U.S., SXSW returns in 2021. Adopting…
Lovers A deceptively boilerplate film noir with shades of drab eroticism, Nicole Garcia’s Lovers belies an astonishing sublimation of its cultural and existential milieux. Premiering…