Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
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...
Aleppo, Syria, 2025. A bombed out shell of its former self. Ten years prior, it was a flourishing city filled with bustling markets, food stalls, prayer, and congregation. Co-directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes chronicle that ten year transformation through the lens of Israa, an Aleppo native. Filming for One in a Million began in...
Shot with cinematic flair, Michał Marczak’s Polish-language documentary Closure is a rattling search and rescue: both for an actual missing kid and the soul of the father searching. Following the disappearance of his teenage son Chris, Daniel diligently scours the Vistula River, hoping to either recover his son’s corpse or uncover some hint that he...
You may have heard the headlines before: without immediate intervention, an “environmental nuclear bomb” is set to go off in the Western USA, in Utah. The Lake, an urgent, fact-filled documentary from Utah-native and first-time feature documentarian Abby Ellis, starts by providing an alarming statistic: over half of the water in the Great Salt Lake...
In the winter of 2021, a group of 60 climbers—a mix of professional mountaineers, Sherpas, and an uncomfortably large number of novices on a paid expedition—gather at a Himalayan base camp to attempt one of the last unclaimed feats in alpine sport: summiting K2 in winter. The Last First: Winter K2, from documentarian Amir Bar-Lev,...
Rich in both place and emotion, shot in evocative black and white, and scored with delicate precision, Color Book is a heartbreaking tale of grief and perseverance. William Catlett gives a tremendous, pathos-drenched performance as Lucky, a father navigating sudden tragedy, alongside his son Mason (Jeremiah Alexander Daniels), who has Down syndrome, after the loss...
A perfectly pleasant — if ultimately forgettable — Irish dramedy about gay author Edvard (James McArdle), who juggles the stress of an impending U.S. book tour while caring for his stroke-recovering mother (Fionnula Flanagan) and looking after the elderly mothers his friends abandoned to attend an overseas Pride Fest. Writer-director Darren Thornton delivers a quietly...
Two hours of uncut existential dread and a career-best turn from Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You from writer-director Mary Bronstein is an uncomfortably intimate character study of a mother unraveling under the weight of her daughter’s medical issues and a gaping ceiling leak threatening to drown what’s left of her sanity....