Not since 2012’s Oscar-nominated Belgian bluegrass film The Broken Circle Breakdown has a European movie been so in love with Americana. There is a significant though dwindling group of Europeans for whom the American dream has always been the ideal fantasy. For these people the most definite way to express …
When the world is a smorgasbord of tastes and sensations you can’t blame someone for wanting to sample it all, but at a certain point you’ve got to admit you know what you prefer. The gimmick of the novel Allegro Pastell is a very good one: it’s the text and …
A true Europudding includes plenty of gratuitous nudity and loads of sex, but those are the only things missing from the supremely ridiculous The Blood Countess. This movie is not good, but it is such a stupidly fun good time that you should see it anyway. It is always a …
The central couple at the heart of this complex Pakistani movie have known each other from around the village since childhood. They are thrown together because everyone else considers them damaged goods. The way they deal with their damage, separately and together, enables an unusual depiction of the power struggles …
The Mexican director Nicolás Pereda has proven himself as one of the most prominent filmmakers of the new generation. In the last three years, he released three films. Lázaro de Noche premiered at the 2024 FIDMarseille, and Cobre was also a world premiere at the French experimental film event in …
Someday a movie in which a group of teenagers throw a mock funeral for a hamster, complete with stone-faced pallbearers carrying a small coffin past hordes of wailing kids dressed up to the nines, will deserve a bad review, but today is not that day. Black Burns Fast has an …
In the Brazilian cinema history, there are classic examples of road trip films. One of them is Iracema by Jorge Bodansky and Orlando Senna, a time capsule on the Northern region of the country during the military dictatorship. Regionally, a landmark of the sensorial cinema in the country is Viajo …
Another small-town story set in its director’s hometown, Romblon island, Filipino filmmaker Ryan Machado’s sophomore feature Raging follows a young man (played by Elijah Canlas) in the aftermath of sexual abuse. Unfolding in the mid-1990s, the film is pensive and unhurriedly paced, portraying its central character’s conflicts as more inward …
In 1979, Iran underwent a severe transformation after the Iranian Revolution. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of the country, fell due to the dissatisfaction of the population, which organized itself politically. The figure of that revolution grew to power, Ayatollah Khomeini, a central individual who established the morality police …
American movies like The Weight used to be a dime a dozen, which is meant as a compliment. It used to be that Hollywood loved to take an action-heavy script, people it with a fun combination of big stars and delightful character actors, move like the wind from one entertaining …
Throughout the more than a hundred and twenty-five years of filmmaking, the film history organized itself into canons and critical retrospectives that analyzed cinema through various prisms. Similar to all of the arts, this canon is white-centered and Anglo-European, excluding the works of people of color, women, and those located …
The ways in which adults make decisions on behalf of children, and how those decisions are, or aren’t, in the child’s best interests are the stuff of life. This wonderful movie begins with questioning what it takes to be an artist, and ends by questioning what it means to be …
There are some movies, including Queen at Sea, which are so disturbing they can only be watched once. Fortunately Queen at Sea is so well made that its care and consideration makes its brutally tough topic easier to handle. This is why it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at …
In 1980 Lily Tomlin was faced with a dilemma. She was riding high after winning a Tony with her one-woman play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe and then starring in feminist revenge comedy 9 to 5, but then she had to do her next thing. …
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 …
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 …