Slow Machine introduces a directing duo happy to noodle and experiment with various modes, but who aren’t yet refined or cogent enough in purpose. Jacques…
Hopinka’s feature debut is a poetic and evocative film, one that seeks to quantify and articulate the symbiosis of humanity and earth. A prolific maker…
While frequently interesting to watch unfold, The Inheritance has no overarching vision and thus finds much of its potential political power muted. Inspired by both…
Atlantis is an unsettling, poignant study of the casual violence that both informs the past and estimates the future. With Atlantis, director Valentyn Vasyanovych (also editor…
With Fourteen, Dan Sallit continues to prove his skill as a masterfully rhythmic writer and purveyor of low-key humanism. Audiences aren’t exactly suffering from a dearth…
Vitalina Varela is a profound humanistic effort, conceptually bold and featuring compositions of affecting beauty. Winner of last year’s Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival,…
Light From Light is being billed as a paranormal ghost story, and while that description certainly isn’t untrue, it presents a conception far different from…
It’s nigh-impossible to discuss the new film In My Room, from Berlin School-affiliated writer/director Ulrich Köhler, without revealing that a third of the way in, seemingly…
Serbian director Ognjen Glavonic’s The Load is so minimal and austere that its title – nominally referring to the cargo carried in the truck driven…
Argentine director Mariano Llinás’s La Flor is a project ten years in the making, and an ode to the sort of movies that filmmakers once…
James Longley’s Angels Are Made of Light is an essential document, chronicling several seasons at the Daqiqi Balkhi School in Kabul, Afghanistan. The remnants of conflict are…
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s intimate epic of friendship between women, Happy Hour, was my favorite film of 2016, so needless to say Asako I & II, which…
Khalik Allah’s new essayistic documentary Black Mother is a deeply moving work of humanistic empathy, intertwining the personal and the political into an aesthetic that attempts…
With Caniba, the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory duo Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor turn their typically assured lens on Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who was deported from Paris in…
Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance is one of the most idiosyncratic feature debuts at this year’s NDNF. As with Ambrose’s NDNF-programmed short film Spiral Jetty, the scenario here is rife…
Carlo de los Santos Arias‘s Cocote moves from a wealthy estate in Santo Domingo to the town of Oviedo, using a personal tale of revenge to examine political, religious,…
Valérie Massadian’s follow-up to her acclaimed (and still undistributed) 2011 debut Nana is precisely controlled, but without ever resorting to a clinical distance from its subject.…
Araby opens with a teenage boy biking home to take care of his sick younger brother, his parents nowhere in sight. He spends the next…
The 47th edition of New Directors/New Films runs from Wednesday, March 28th, to Sunday, April 8th. For our first of two dispatches from the festival, we look at the FIPRESCI Discovery…
Bertrand Bonello’s controversial new feature Nocturama, which was passed over by both the Cannes and Venice film festivals, has been pigeonholed as a film that supports…