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‘Magellan’ Film Review: Lav Diaz’s Radical Omissions

Forty-four minutes into Magellan, we see the eponymous Portuguese navigator at the film’s center, deftly portrayed by Gael García Bernal, sitting still inside a 16th-century tavern, his mind drifting elsewhere. He grips a walking cane on one hand, then an oversized hat on the other. Lit candles beside him quietly …

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‘Human Resource’ Film Review: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Return to Realism Reckons With Personal Agency in a Harsh World

Playing in the Orizzonti competition program at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, Thai director and screenwriter Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s latest vision Human Resource doubles as an intimate character study and a meditative portrait of contemporary Thai life mapped through the soul-sapping mechanics of corporate grind, a kind of a white-collar …

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‘Nova ‘78’ Film Review: A Prophetic William Burroughs Tribute

Playing out of competition at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, Nova ‘78, from the directing duo of Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias, functions both as a moving paean to the enduring greatness of eminent writer and iconoclast William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and an electrifying snapshot of a bygone period of …

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‘Fantasy’ Film Review: Kukla’s Surreal Social Drama is One of 2025’s Strongest Debuts

A competitive entry in the Filmmakers of the Present program of the Locarno Film Festival’s 78th edition, Fantasy, the feature directorial debut from Slovenian musician and director Kukla, at times credited as Katarina Bogdanović, is a hypnotic, surreal expansion of the story the filmmaker initially sketched in her award-winning short …

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‘Tabi to Hibi’ Film Review: Shô Miyake’s Golden Leopard Winner is a Pulsating Drama About Existential Solitude and the Limits of Language

An incommunicable solitude pulsates at the heart of Tabi to Hibi — also titled Two Seasons, Two Strangers — the bifurcated drama from Japanese writer-director Shô Miyake, who just won a career-defining Pardo d’Oro (Golden Leopard) for the movie, following its world premiere in the Concorso Internazionale section of this …

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‘A Balcony in Limoges’ Film Review: A Subtle, Slippery Morality Tale (Locarno)

Premiering in the Filmmakers of the Present competition of the recently concluded Locarno Film Festival, A Balcony in Limoges, French writer-director Jérôme Reybaud’s feature follow-up to his debut 4 Days in France (2016), is the kind of movie that one might describe as deceptive, or unforeseen at the very least, …

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Fantasia 2025: ‘I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn’ Film Review: A Lovely Ode to Rediscovering Artistic and Romantic Desire

Winner of the Bronze audience prize for Best Asian Feature at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn is a captivating romantic comedy that functions as yet another endearing paean to independent horror cinema from Japanese cult filmmaker Kenichi Ugana, following …

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‘Solomamma’ Film Review: A Single Mother Finds A Second Coming of Age in Janicke Askevold’s Soberly Riveting Drama (Locarno)

2025 is slowly turning into a banner year for Norwegian cinema, not least because of the Grand Prix acclaim of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, already touted as one of “The 100 Best Movies of the 2020s (So Far),” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Not long prior to that, Nina …

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‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Review: Netflix’s Top Animated Movie is a Visual and Sonic Smash

KPop Demon Hunters, the latest musical adventure from Sony Pictures Animation, is, in many respects, a global hit. Released in mid-June, the title is officially the most-watched animated movie of all time on Netflix, its distributor. Currently, the film sits comfortably at No. 2 on the streaming service’s Global Top …

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Fantasia 2025: ‘Redux Redux’ Film Review: Michaela McManus Travels the Multiverse in this Striking Grief Indie

It feels like every movie I’ve seen at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival turns into an instant favorite, from A Grand Mockery, a hypnotic Super 8mm avant-garde trip from Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs, to Anything That Moves, an inventively transgressive Giallo/Bomba picture courtesy of Alex Phillips. Every …

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Fantasia 2025: ‘Dui Shaw’ Film Review: Nuhash Humayun’s Folklore-fueled Anthology Runs the Tonal Gamut

Dui Shaw, courtesy of Bangladeshi writer-director Nuhash Humayun – who made history as the first filmmaker from Bangladesh to cop an Oscar nomination for the post-apocalyptic short film Moshari (2022), executive produced by horror master Jordan Peele and Sound of Metal star Riz Ahmed – locates grimy, cyclic folklores in …

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Fantasia 2025: ‘Every Heavy Thing’ Film Review: Mickey Reece’s Big Tech Thriller is a Surreal Trip

Every Heavy Thing, the latest feature from prolific indie auteur Mickey Reece which just had its world premiere at Fantasia 2025, is a pulsing technothriller propelled by daring Lynchian experimentations. Essentially, it feels like a standalone Black Mirror episode reckoning with the threat of Big Tech in American suburbs. Mounted …

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Fantasia 2025: ‘Hellcat’ Film Review: Dakota Gorman is a Visceral Force in Brock Bodell’s Suffocating Survival Horror

Brock Bodell’s feature directorial debut, Hellcat, which made its world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, is a chamber survival horror-thriller that manages to be effectively tense and visceral despite a premise that we’ve come across a few too many times before. Produced and shot entirely in Nashville, …

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Fantasia 2025: ‘Hold the Fort’ Film Review: A Silly Monster Mayhem with a B-movie Charm

A horror-comedy that perfectly evokes the schlocky charm and madness of B-movies has been a rare sight since the last decade, save of course for Shin’ichirō Ueda’s 2017 low-budget film-within-a-film comedy, One Cut of the Dead, the last ingenious and delightfully funny effort I could name and recommend. Something you …

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‘Food Delivery’ Documentary Film Review: Country Underwater

Five minutes into Food Delivery: Fresh from the West Philippine Sea, the latest documentary from Filipino filmmaker Baby Ruth Villarama, we are presented with a patchwork of news headlines, archived footage depicting Filipino and Chinese maritime vessels ramming into each other, and graphics mapping the Philippines’ nautical borders. A propulsive …

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TV Review: ‘Squid Game’ Season 3’s Bloated Gore Depletes its Once-Cutting Satire

When Squid Game, the South Korean survival drama series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, debuted in 2021, it took the world by storm, topping Netflix’s most-watched list barely two weeks in, and at one point becoming “the most in-demand show in the world, with 79 times as much audience interest as …

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