Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under…
Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk seems likely to be the most important film to screen at the 2025…
There are two kinds of cinephile: those who hear a movie described as “Black Swan on ice” and sneer, noses upturned, their one-line, one-and-a-half star…
In the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, a Kyiv-based auditorium turns into an ad hoc military classroom. Civilians take turns…
One day, noticing an influx of dust into their apartment due to some construction outside, a person known only as an “academic ladyboy” (as they…
Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done begins with a cryptic series of images; pitch-black night, a pile of discarded clothing, closeups of various faces, impassive…
Sound of Falling Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers…
Ever since his debut fiction film My Joy (2010) premiered in the main competition of Cannes, Sergei Loznitsa has been a repeat visitor to the…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
A white person adrift in an “exotic” land, losing themselves in order to find themselves in the perceived primitiveness, peculiarity, or freedom of their strange…
The titular girl of The Girl in the Snow, director Louise Hémon’s debut feature, appears repeatedly as a dark silhouette. Clad in a black cloak…
Biblical scholars and theologians use “antediluvian” to describe the world of Genesis between the fall from Eden and the flood. Literally meaning “before the flood,”…
Across five feature films to date, most of which exist within a liminal space located between fiction and documentary narrative, demarcated with blurred lines, Roberto…
Universal Language opens on a static wide shot outside a French language school in snowy Winnipeg. We see the teacher grumpily trudge in late. Once…
Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel are a contemporary duo whose work rebukes and inquires into the reactionary, philosophical response to an accelerated technological development, rendering…
The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly in-joke of changing…
“This city takes time away from you,” says one of the seven disembodied voices introducing us to the wide-awake-at-night Mumbai city in the lyrical opening…
Now with three feature films under his belt, Tyler Taormina has become our premier chronicler of a certain kind of suburban dreamscape — opaque, occasionally…
Belgian writer-director Claude Schmitz’s third feature, The Other Laurens, is a dry-humor thriller with an existential neo-noir façade. Viewers expecting a tense, philosophical slow-burn akin…
Advanced mathematics on film is often treated as a gateway to mental illness (Pi) or espionage (The Imitation Game) or in some instances both (A…