In their debut feature film, Esta Isla (This Island), Lorraine Jones Molina and Christian Carretero narrate a story about love and crime. Bebo (Zion Ortiz) is a working-class young man who lives on an island in Puerto Rico. He fishes in the sea with his brother Charlie (Xavier Morales). They …
In a meta-accomplishment that is owed kudos, Florian Zeller goes from The Father to The Son in a misguided misfire that attempts one idea: trauma is inherited from father to son. When Florian Zeller’s debut feature The Father premiered at Sundance in 2020, it was met with rapturous acclaim. It …
At the outset, F1 was already a hard film to review. Similar to Ezra Miller, the longtime actor Brad Pitt’s personal life has become a conflicting topic, especially since his family life hit the news. At the same time, F1 director Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick is one of the …
Comfort television can be a grey area for many viewers. What one may find comforting could be dull and trite to others. That’s what makes some television series hard to connect with for some viewers. Particularly, this can be attributed to shows about the entertainment industry. With the common TV-watcher …
Hacks season 4 has come to a close, and what a ride it has been! I admit, I lost faith early in the process, but the writers were able to pull off a solid season of television. The finale, Heaven, is a bit of a come-down after the highs of …
The veteran indie director Stephanie Laing (Irreplaceable You and Family Squares) teams up with Rose Byrne to present Tow. The film tells the true story of Amanda Ogle (Byrne), a woman who left her child, Avery (Elsie Fisher), to find a better life condition as a veterinary technician. However, she …
Director David Verbeek presents his latest film, The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard, at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Divided into chapters, the film narrates the story of a girl (Jessica Reynolds) who lives in the woods as a wolf. She behaves, eats, and walks like a wolf. Suddenly, …
In her debut feature premiering at this year’s Tribeca, Lillian T. Mehrel narrates about the relationship between a mother and daughter in Honeyjoon. In the film, June (Ayden Mayeri) and Lela (Amira Casar) travel to Açores in Portugal to celebrate the first anniversary of the family patriarch’s death. In their …
Australian director Charles Williams presents his debut feature: Inside. Williams won the short film Palme d’Or in 2018 at Cannes for All These Creatures and soon became a potential talent for the future. Six years later, the director narrates the story of a young man, Mel (Vincent Miller), who is …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 – …