Aaron (Cooper Raiff) is having a tough time of it. His little sister, Leah (Kaitlyn Dever), his best friend and, maybe, his soul mate (in the completely platonic sense), has taken her own life. Though she’d wrestled with mental health issues in the past, the reality of her actually following through, of truly leaving home...
Loving married couple Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) and Luis (Damián Alcázar) have been practicing for the amateur Latin senior dance contest in director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan Shake Your Booty. At home, Haru watches ballroom dance videos, studiously. Luis lovingly calms her nerves. They are prepared. They are in love. When their dance finally comes, in...
The dissolution of a twelve-year marriage is a complicated thing, especially when you have a kid. Even moreso when you are facing the potential of impending war. Lithuanian couple Marija (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) and Vytas (Marius Repšys) are stuck in a loveless marriage, but Marija’s, ahem, strongly-worded proposal for separation couldn’t have come at a...
Sara Dosa’s highly anticipated follow-up to Fire of Love arrives with the same promise of poetic science-meets-humanity. But where her debut doc was incandescent, this one plays like a glacially paced elegy that mistakes lyricism for emotional pull.
“It’s amazing to be needed,” so says the affectionate day nurse Mona (Eleonore Hendricks) in Georgia Bernstein’s bizarre psychosexual horror Night Nurse. She works alongside a troupe of other young women, each assigned to their own older man, in a luxury retirement home that’s deeply unsettling from the jump. Something peculiar is happening there, but...
There’s something in the air in If I Go Will They Miss Me. Planes drone overhead constantly in this lyrical, Moonlight-coded debut, a feature-length expansion of Walter Thompson-Hernández’s earlier short of the same name. Beneath them, a father and son circle each other in a jagged dance of longing, legacy, and quiet double-edged disappointment. Big...
Archival footage reveals a city in flux, swelling amidst years of demonstrations and unrest across Glasgow, Ireland. History falls like dominoes through the flicker of old newscasts. Hope, growth, loss, and resistance all swirling in the streets. On Eid Mubarak 2021, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, immigration enforcement shows up on Kenmure Street,...
A profoundly upsetting documentary, Sentient explores the multitudinous horrors of the animal testing infrastructure—not just the physical, psychological, and spiritual toll on the animals, but the damage done to the human technicians, scientists, and doctors complicit in the process, all underpinned by science that may not be as solid as it claims to be. Centered...
When 11-year-old Iris’ absentee father, Aris, slinks back into town for his father’s funeral in their sleepy Greek fishing village, she tracks him down to an abandoned shipyard and tries to wedge herself into his pathetic little life. In writer-director Myrsini Aristidou’s Greek-language Hold Onto Me (Κράτα Με), this relationship, performed beautifully by Christos Passalis...
Anna may be an adult, but her cognitive impairment (unspecified in the film, though decidedly on the autism spectrum) means she requires close care from her adoptive parents. The issue is that they’re now elderly and ailing themselves, hardly ideal caretakers. When Anna’s mother dies unexpectedly, her care falls to her father (Victor Slezak), who...