After working on their respective short films and co-directing the documentary short Dollar Pizza Documentary, Brooklyn-based filmmakers Travis Wood and Alex Mallis are upping the ante as their debut feature The Travel Companion is having its world premiere in the US Narrative Competition section of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. …
There are some shots of actress Suzu Hirose in A Pale View of Hills that are so gorgeous the audience at the Cannes Film Festival gasped aloud. Cinematographer Piotr Niemyjski clearly made heavy use of visual effects in his work – not least for the many gorgeous shots of Nagasaki …
The generic title underplays the importance of this French war film, which does something utterly shocking from an American perspective: it pays respect to France’s allies, too. Not since the days of World War II movies have any American films bothered to mark our allies, even in passing. (A brief …
In the USA, the Italian actress Valeria Golino is mainly famous for two very different roles: as Tom Cruise’s sexy girlfriend in the incredibly serious Rain Man from 1988, and then as Charlie Sheen’s sexy love interest in the incredibly silly Hot Shots! movies in 1991 and 1993. Ms. Golino …
No one quite knows what to do with director Fatih Akin. His explosive early movie Head-On was about the complex convergence of immigration and mental health issues between two Turkish-German punks. It’s one of the most violent and romantic movies ever made and also one of the smartest about intersectional …
The Peruvian director Augusto Zegarra presents his debut feature, Runa Simi, at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. The film narrates the story of Fernando Valencia, an indigenous man from Cusco, Peru. He has been passionate about voice work since he was a young child, inspired by Walt Disney animations that …
In Cuerpo Celeste, the symbolically loaded debut feature from Chilean writer-director Nayra Ilic García, the past not only fractures the present and future but actively exists along with it as if they are all one and the same. The film explores that threshold, the possibility to re-encounter even something we …
In his debut directorial effort, French director Laurent Slama joins forces with Alex Lawter and Agathe Rousselle to deliver a story about a woman on suicidal watch in A Second Life. Set on the opening day of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, we follow Elisabeth (Rouselle), who is living …
Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival thanks to the three central performances by Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning and Stellan Skarsgård. Director Joachim Trier has a real talent for pulling out the emotional subtexts of ordinary lives and figuring out why people make the choices …
In his debut feature, Backside, Mexican director Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana tells the untold stories behind one of the most crucial sports events in the United States, the Kentucky Derby. Every May, more than a hundred thousand people attend the traditional horse racing event at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. Besides …
Romería is the movie above all others I have been recommending from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. That is because this is such a powerful story, told with such an incredible amount of love, that it is utterly impossible to be unaffected by it. And that is before I mention …
The Uruguayan director Lucia Garibaldi presents her sophomore feature, Un Futuro Brillante (A Bright Future), at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Her first film, Los Tiburones (The Sharks), premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Consequently, her subsequent work became a highly anticipated title on the festival circuit, and it …
Romane Bohringer is a French actor who, for her second film as director, has chosen to make an extremely personal story about her search for more information about her mother, Maggy, who left the family before she was a year old and died when Ms. Bohringer was in her early …
This enormous, sumptuous, magnificent movie is almost too much, which is not a complaint. Resurrection is one of those movies that decided to tell the story of a universe starting with a kitchen sink and then built out from there. It’s very long – 160 minutes in this edit – …
In her sophomore effort, Suzannah Herbert premieres her film Natchez at the Tribeca Film Festival. The documentary title borrows its name from the city in Mississippi. In the 1800s, it was the city with the most millionaires in the world; cotton plantations and the slave trade were the main commercial …
The movie with the best title at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is also the kind of movie filmmakers love to make: a movie about making a movie. But less joyously, the setting here is present-day Egypt, a nation not currently enjoying the delights of democracy. The creatives involved, beginning …
The French/Polish director Julia Kowalski recently premiered her Que Ma Volonté Soit Faite (Her Will Be Done). It is a Quinzaine Des Cineastes selection and the director’s sophomore full-length feature, Crache Cœur (Raging Rose). The film narrates the story of Nawojka (Maria Wróbel), a girl from rural France whose parents …
Ukrainian directors Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith, and Simon Mozgovyi present their take on the war with Militantropos. The word, which appears after the title cards, comes from the Latin word Milit (soldier) and the Greek Antropos (human). The film uses the combination of those words to formulate its thesis on …
Why is a movie about the aftermath of a Parisian career woman’s mental breakdown, set in a small town in eastern France, named after an area of the west coast of Ireland? Because in 1981 a French singer, Michel Sardou, had a massive hit with a song called “Les lacs …
This Japanese movie is named after an art print a preteen girl buys her terminally ill father. This strange misdirection fits this quietly misguided film, about how that girl passes the time while her parents are too preoccupied for her. This includes some topics on the very edge of what …