Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
During Ghost Month, the boundary between the living and the dead is supposed to thin. The gates of hell open up. The ghosts get hungrier. Or so says Gracie’s Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), who delivers this unsettling tidbit with the weary authority of someone who’s seen some things. For Gracie’s family, this bit of folklore...
In the midst of the Great Depression, Samuel Murphy, played by the ever-reliable Ethan Hawke, is separated from his daughter and sent to a hard labor camp. His crime? Being poor. And maybe punching the wrong guys. At the camp, Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) notes Murphy’s quiet intelligence and problem-solving gumption; he might just be...
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...