Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
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...
On August 11, 2023, police in Marion, Kansas, a town where “everyone knows everyone” isn’t just a saying, it’s civic policy, raided the offices of the Marion County Record. They seized computers, phones, and personal devices, even searched the homes of the paper’s staff. A day later, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer died. Her doctor...
Tell Me Everything unfolds like a memory. Or a bad dream that has grown nostalgic with time. From its oversaturated aesthetic to the buoyant Israeli disco influences and gaudy ’80s production design, writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s Hebrew-language film is soaked in the specificity of time and place. It hopscotches through timelines in Tel Aviv to tell...
An extremely wealthy benefactor decides to buy up a plot of land and provide housing for a small faction of self-proclaimed communists in Alford, Massachusetts in the powerful, provocative, and infuriating documentary from Sinéad O’Shea, All About the Money. Her film begins with what should be a startling statistic—that the top 1% of Americans own...
Shame and Money, writer-director Visar Morina’s pastoral-then-metropolitan slice-of-life drama from the landlocked Eastern European Republic of Kosovo, interrogates what’s left when a family’s livelihood collapses and they’re forced to fend for themselves in a new environment. For Shaban’s hardworking family, upheaval begins when their untrustworthy brother steals the family cow. Their routine of livestock tending,...
We meet 14-year-old Sid Bookman (Ani Palmer) in a video chat room. It’s 2006, New Zealand, still deep in the dial-up age. Talking to a guy online, Sid says she’s 18 and claims her camera’s broken. It’s not. A chubby, shirtless 35-year-old wanks off on the other side. It’s these moments from the early internet...
Historically, men would duel to the death when their reputations were tarnished, but international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson argues that “too many men were dying that way, so they introduced defamation laws.” This was supposed to be a more civilized method—allow legal practitioners to decide what is and is not true regarding reputation and...
Mary (Hannah Lynch) isn’t up to much. Mostly, she loafs around and jerks off to hentai porn. When a new neighbor, Boo (Arlo Green), around her age, shows up, the antisocial underachiever befriends the socially awkward loner because he’s got tentacles on his dong. Turns out he’s probably an alien, as the title unsubtly suggests....
American Doctor forces audiences to confront the carnage inflicted on Gaza’s civilians, particularly children, early and often. For anyone who somehow avoided footage of dead babies across social media in 2025, the film offers a corrective almost immediately. One doctor argues it would be “journalistic malpractice” not to show the corpses, claiming that omitting them...