Shot between August 2016 and January 2017 in the Dom Pedro Hotel in the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazilian filmmaker Maíra Bühler’s Let it Burn is…
The Neighboring Sounds festival booklet describes Private Fiction as Argentinean filmmaker Andres Di Tella charting a turbulent 20th Century romance through archival photos and letters from his parents,…
Miguel Hilari’s Compania is a small, modest gem of a film, a poetic evocation of mystical and religious ceremonies juxtaposed with the natural beauty of the agrarian…
Beanpole is a rending vision of aftermath, conjuring moments of real beauty from misery. War films have been with us as long as film has been…
VHYes is a wannabe absurdist curiosity but is instead an interminable viewing experience. Jack Henry Robbins’ VHYes is the kitschy, post-ironic, pseudo-found footage 80’s pastiche the world didn’t…
…Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its…
Peter Strickland is a stylistic maximalist, an homage specialist who makes Tarantino look like a film school pedant. Along with Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani…
The films of Jessica Hausner can be maddeningly opaque, but obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. Her newest film, Little Joe, makes a fascinating double feature…
For some inexplicable reason, Netflix seems to have set its sights on reviving the early-to- mid 90’s boom of erotic thrillers, old-fashioned melodramas mixed with…
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, based on Jonathan Lethem’s novel, is by Norton’s own admission a passion project some 20 years in the making. It’s easy to…
Ridley Scott’s Alien is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and so here comes Memory: The Origins of Alien. Part behind-the-scenes featurette, part essay film, one wishes…
It’s incredibly difficult for a television show to stick the landing. Long running programs tend to become different things for different viewers, particularly shows that…
Federico Veiroj’s The Moneychanger is a mess — an overly familiar rise-and-fall narrative that’s been stripped of all meaningful detail and specificity, with a sketchy…
It is endlessly frustrating to see Netflix continue to gobble up talented, idiosyncratic directors and spew out garbled, muddled nonsense. As critic Katie Rife recently…
At his best, Arnaud Desplechin is a mad tinkerer, creating weird, expansive narratives that follow dysfunctional people through the vicissitudes of every day life. He’s…
Lifting a page from a varied litany of genre precedents, Jovanka Vuckovic’s Riot Girls envisions a post-apocalyptic world — brought about via virus, not zombies…
Precise figures will vary, but the fact remains that our world is in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since WWII. The convergence of…
With Ana, Mon Amour, director Calin Peter Netzer is desperately trying to align himself with the great figures of doomed romantic cinema, from Rivette and Cassavettes…
Paula Hernandez’s The Sleepwalkers begins with the sounds of a ticking clock and running water over a black screen. The noises increase in intensity until…