James Benning is one of the most prominent experimental directors in history. Labeled as a researcher of the American landscapes, his work features a formally rigorous study of the United States and its structures. His interest in the composition of the country is evident in his most well-known films: The …
The Brazilian director Gabe Klinger has built his career entirely in the United States. Based in Chicago, he directed the documentary Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater, Porto, and the short film Bergman’s Ghosts, a complementary work to Bergman Island, the Cannes film by Mia Hansen-Løve. For the first …
It’s very normal for documentaries to begin and end with copious lists of the various production companies who have contributed to or enabled its making. As director Valerie Veatch pointed out in her Sundance Film Festival Q&A, Ghost in the Machine has none of these. She had to fund the …
In 2023, the Brazilian documentary veteran, Eliza Capai, released her Incompatível com a Vida (Incompatible with Life). Despite being a mix of talking head with diary documentary, it is an utterly personal telling of her experience with the traumatic loss of her baby in her womb. The director tells her …
I think we can blame the English royal family. When TV shows like Succession, The Righteous Gemstones and Yellowstone decide to examine the interpersonal struggle for power within an unbelievable wealthy family, they’ve all worked from the same template: tyrannical father and absent or dead mother with three sons and …
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die takes the worst nightmares of the current moment and turns them into comedy, but the kind of comedy where if you didn’t laugh you’d cry. This is done in the lighthearted comic blockbuster style best described as a mash-up where 1990s French horror-comedy Delicatessen …
This Chilean-Argentinian coproduction is a Chilean story but was filmed in Argentina for reasons its subject matter makes obvious. The military coup in Chile in 1973 that started with the murder of Salvador Allende brought about (speaking with understatement here) such a traumatic time to the nation that the after-effects …
The legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty made history with his documentary Nanook of the North, a pioneering film, considered the first non-fiction work. Despite the controversies and claims of its stagings, it establishes the medium’s interest in the study of the human organization and the different cultures. A century later, we …
It’s only January but Scottish documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street is a very serious contender for best documentary of the year. It’s rare to feel a documentary so firmly plant the seed of possibility in the mind of its audience. But there are three things audiences need to know in …
In 2022, the Academy-nominated documentary Filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) impressed the audiences with a sonic experiment in his 32 Sounds. Mixed as an experiment to watch at the theater and scenes where the sound echoes differently in each soundbar, it illustrates how, underneath the technical experimentation, Green’s films …
Filipino genre filmmaker Pedring Lopez world premiered his first English-language film, the neo-noir thriller Shadow Transit, at last year’s QCinema International Film Festival. An independent co-production between the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Canada, Shadow Transit centers on a chance encounter between a grieving singer-photographer and a drifting DJ, resulting in …
Cinderella meets Monstro Elisasue in Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt’s directorial debut The Ugly Stepsister, which at once functions like a twisted paean to and a biting, though still-restrained, rebuke of the whole Cinderella fairy tale, all hinged on a sinisterly fascinating performance from Lea Myren, who plays the title character. …
Romanian writer-director Andrei Epure already tested the premise of his feature debut Don’t Let Me Die, which premiered in the Filmmakers of the Present section of the 2025 Locarno Film Festival, in his 2021 short film Intercom 15, an entry in Cannes’ Critics’ Week. In fact, exactly seven minutes into …
Ready or Not tackles a difficult topic – very young teenagers playing very adult games – with a level of sympathy for their misadventures which makes the tough subject easy to watch. Writer Lynn Ruane and director Claire Frances Byrne talked at the Irish Film Festival London screening I attended …
Renoir, the sophomore feature from Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, continues her cinematic exploration of the notions of death, old age, and loneliness, preoccupations that loom over her body of work, such as in her feature debut Plan 75 (2022), the anthology film Ten Years Japan (2018), which she co-directed with …
This clever no-budget thriller is automatically recommended by me because it’s in the Irish language. Its aspirational depiction of life entirely inside the Irish language, which rarely happens in real life, is just wonderful to see. It is also a heist movie, with three women (two of whom are middle-aged) …
Future Days takes the future of new music to Birmingham in a stellar showcase of some of the best up and comers. I was eagerly anticipating first band Piss and they more than delivered – performance art on stage; warning the audience that it may be an uncomfortable set as …
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard transformed from rave set that tore up Electric Brixton into an orchestra that tore up the Royal Albert Hall in an excellent show from one of our finest chameleons. The most prolific, enduring band of our current age show they’re the best at what …
Some might say Lady, which had its world premiere at the London Film Festival, is Saltburn meets What We Do in the Shadows. That’s not correct, as it’s both those movies meets Florence Foster Jenkins. By which I mean, Lady is a faux-documentary about an utterly deluded and impossibly wealthy …
Following its Sundance world premiere in early 2025, The Things You Kill, the third feature from Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami, is set to screen in Philippine theaters as part of the 2025 QCinema International Film Festival. Selected as the Canadian submission for the 2026 Oscar Best International Feature Film category, …