Winner of the Orrizonti Award for Best Film at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, On the Road (En el Camino) is, at its core, a poignant tale of repressed desire bursting in the most undesirable of places. It’s the fifth feature from Mexican writer-director David Pablos, and it’s the …
There are only so many ways a film like Sweetheart, originally titled Gioia Mia, pans out. Special Jury Prize winner at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival’s Filmmakers of the Present competition, Margherita Spampinato’s debut feature is a predictably compelling take on the coming-of-age genre: a schmaltzy drama about grief and …
The formula established in Knives Out and Glass Onion has been changed in Wake Up Dead Man. The series of good old-fashioned murder mysteries solved by gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has been a roaring success because they were mostly about fabulously wealthy people being held to account. Tweaking the …
Jude Law’s first appearance as Vladimir Putin is so eerily accurate the Venice Film Festival audience around me laughed in surprise. Who would have thought he could do it? Well congratulations to director Olivier Assayas and his casting director Antoinette Boulat, because the performance Mr. Law gives here is one …
It’s summertime. The glowing sun is out, and the air is calm. It’s the perfect excuse to take a swim or lie still on the grass and wonder about what’s next in your life. It’s certainly the case, or at least initially, for a group of working-class teenagers in Ion …
Since its first exhibition, film has played a crucial role in portraying memory and the feeling of daily life. Directors utilize cinema as a tool to immortalize places, stories, and people. It is the case for Amir Aziz, who delivers a homage in the nostalgia-heavy Daroon-e Amir, or Inside Amir. …
There’s a little scene late in Silent Rebellion (À bras-le-corps) where a disgusting boss offers the young heroine, Emma (a wonderful Lila Gueneau), a “chance” at promotion, but is prevented from molesting her by an older female colleague making a scene. The other woman is punished, but she and Emma …
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 …
There are certain movies which only exist because someone has needed to make them. They are too weird to be mainstream and too proud of their unusual style to truly be weird. This is by no means a complaint. When people lean very hard into style over substance it is …
It’s not really a surprise that Jim Jarmusch has won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival for Father Mother Sister Brother. He has always been a major filmmaker working in a minor key, and here we have another one of his portmanteau films, this time three thematically …
The Swiss-Canadian director, Peter Mettler, is a respected documentary filmmaker. Focusing on exploring the miracles of existence, his films observe the environment surrounding human beings. In this sense, he tends to release long films that meditate on the humane reality. His career spans four decades, featuring celebrated films like Picture …
There is a needle drop in Mother so insane that it either singlehandedly turns the movie into a triumph or ruins it completely, and I still can’t decide which it is. But this is precisely the point director Teona Strugar Mitevska is trying to make with her fictionalised biopic of …
It is so hard to figure out how other people think that a movie like Silent Friend, which lays it all out step by step, is just so incredibly cool. The fact that it is hooked onto a real tree in a real place – an enormous ginkgo tree in …
Benedetta Porcaroli won the Best Actress prize in the Orrizonti strands of the Venice Film Festival simply because this ridiculous movie would not have been possible without her spectacular performance. The Kidnapping of Arabella (Il rapimento di Arabella) does indeed involve a kidnapping but one in which we are not …
In 2023, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) released a list of the fifty greatest Canadian films ever. At the top of the list, it was not the name of David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley, Jean-Marc Vallée, or Atom Egoyan. It was Zacharias Kunuk with his historical 2001 film, Atanarjuat: The Fast …
Director Maryam Touzani, who co-wrote Calle Málaga with Nabil Ayouch, starts extremely strongly with this tale of an elderly woman finally making her own choices in life, but loses the courage of her convictions. This is ironic as this is very much a story of how you cannot have your …
Cotton Queen is the debut film of Russian-Sudanese writer-director Suzannah Mirghani and very clearly made for an international audience. The establishing shots of laughing teenager cotton workers watching Tiktoks make sure, even if we know nothing about Sudan, we know it’s firmly in the now. And while it is Sudanese …
Even before her debut feature, Sophy Romvari has become a highly regarded upcoming director among the online cinephiles. Her shorts Norman Norman, Still Processing, and It’s What Each Person Needs were part of the selections at the Toronto International Film Festival. Criterion Channel acquired some of her other films, such …
This movie, for which the English title should be My Tennis Coach and it’s weird that it isn’t, is an affable Italian road movie about the coming of age of a wannabe tennis player. The entire thing is built around the nuclear-level charm of Pierfrancesco Favino (who previously worked with …
Teenage self-assurance takes a serious hit in Stereo Girls but its sense of friendship and fun is strong enough to go to some dark places without losing its way. It’s an even bigger joy to see a movie about teenage girls who have such a strong sense of themselves, even …