The best of the experimental film programming at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2025 is actually found outside the program specifically dedicated…
Brigid McCaffrey’s debut feature plays very much like a pleasant walk in the woods. One is surrounded by the hazy glint of sunlight on foliage,…
There’s an opaque yet stern quality to Kaloyan (Ognyan “Fyre” Pavlov), a heavily tattooed young man returning to his small Bulgarian hometown after many years…
In Aude Léa Rapin’s sci-fi drama, Planet B, the French government has imprisoned dissidents in a virtual prison. Bodies are kept in a vegetative state…
In a concise opening, Thierry de Peretti’s In His Own Image introduces its heroine Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo), a young and passionate photographer who seems to…
The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and…
Patricia Mazuy is one of the greatest directors working today, but you’d hardly know it from how often her films are screened or talked about.…
With an education system as corrupt and ineffectual as that of the United States, stories of real teachers making a genuine difference are few and…
At one end, a nearly perfunctory art documentary; on the other, a lively essay film on color; in between, a shambolic chronicle of a failed…
Few works of art have a history as rousing or enigmatic as Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. The tale goes something like this: Goya, possibly very…
A simple sprinkling of chemicals into an in-ground pool reveals more about the enigmatic figure at the center of Ted Kennedy’s B.F. Skinner Plays Himself…
Julian Castronovo is 27 years old. He’s 6’1” and 155 pounds. This is the only biographical information you’ll find about him on his website, and…
It’s a sign of great writing when you can identify everything you love and hate about a character, but can’t decide whether you love or…
Coming-of-age movies are a dime a dozen, at this point practically an entire sub-genre of Sundance-approved indie calling cards. Which is perhaps why Henry Bernadet’s…
Alice-Heart optimistically envisions a world in which an aspiring writer’s dream of financial security through her art is still achievable — if unlikely. Combined with…
In the Mouth, the sophomore feature from Cory Santilli (Saul at Night, 2019) is everything from a film noir to a prison escape thriller to…
The title of Erica Xia-Hou’s stirring if conspicuous first feature is not a misprint: “banr,” translated and truncated from the Mandarin term for “partner,” serves…
Stardom is a morbid enterprise, and the life of its luminaries always has a tacit alliance with their expiration date. Often, fame intensifies upon death,…
In Alice Lowe’s first feature since Prevenge in 2016, which announced the actress and writer as a talented director to boot, we are witness to…
Early in Jazzy, Morissa Maltz’s follow-up to her feature narrative debut The Unknown Country, a pair of best friends sit in the sunken center of…