Introducing The Damned at its world premiere, Roberto Minervini stated that the film began from a desire to “deconstruct the precepts in war cinema,” e.g. good versus evil, “hyper-masculini...
Now that Megalopolis has premiered, nothing has actually changed. The film is a self-consciously impractical act that few would care nearly as much about if it weren’t very publicly known to ha...
At dinner my first night at this year’s Cannes, a friend asked our waiter if this was his restaurant’s busiest time of year. Not even close; that would be MIPIM, “the world’s leading real...
“I’m so happy,” producer Park Tae-joon said at the Jeonju Cinema Project awards, one of the ceremonies indicating the festival was drawing to a close. “Every day I drank festival drinkin...
It’s not necessarily that, in a pathetic version of Henry Hill’s childhood desire to be a gangster, I’ve “always wanted to attend a pitch forum.” But I’ve admittedly been curious to s...
Launching in 2017 with a reissue of The Last Movie, Arbelos Films grew out of co-founders’ David Marriott, Dennis Bartok, Craig Rogers and Ei Toshinari’s experiences working at Cinelicious Pi...
Having living abroad for 19 years, music critic Philip Sherburne recently described the culture shock of returning home and trying to navigate an American supermarket: “the self-checkout machin...
A decade ago, I interviewed Argentinian filmmaker Martín Rejtman for an hour, walking through the general scope of his career before discussing his then-most-recent feature, Two Shots Fired, whi...
Like Lance Oppenheim‘s first feature, 2020’s Some Kind of Heaven, his follow-up Spermworld follows three nonfiction protagonists through a niche American context. Heaven focused on three res...
In 2012, Bob Byington won a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Somebody Up There Likes Me; last year, he returned with Lousy Carter. Writing about the festival, I said of the fil...
“Are you getting what you want, bitch?” Philly Abe, the focus of Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, repeatedly offers similarly styled examples of “director-subject negotiations,” in w...
MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight begins as the Berlinale winds down, allowing the fest to grab freshly premiered titles from there, Rotterdam and Sundance (from the latter, opening night selection R...
First you get radicalized, then you get professionalized—a familiar trajectory Chris Smith’s Devo retells in a familiar idiom. After sitting down with dour conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert...
Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s first feature, 1997’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, intertwined news footage of plane hijackings with voiceover readings of passages from Don DeLillo’s White Nois...
There’s a story about a Soviet commissar who, upon seeing Solaris, proved that he both completely understood the movie and didn’t understand it at all by indignantly demanding to know what th...
An experiment in shooting a movie entirely from a first-person POV, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has conceptual precedents but no meaningful ones in terms of the camera’s weight and the opera...
It’s rare to see a comedy immediately get going in its first shot as Between the Temples does—no credits, throat-clearing establishing shots or slow unveiling of protagonists, instead a slow ...
Amidst diminishing film coverage and uncertainty about the future of arthouse theatrical distribution, Sundance offers movies arriving with distribution a near-guarantee of concentrated response ...
Introducing Time of the Heathen on day two of the inaugural FILM FEST KNOX, artistic director Darren Hughes teased that “75 minutes from now, you will be among the hundreds—or perhaps thousan...
In the opening days of this year’s edition of IDFA, the documentary festival issued two statements on the bombing of Gaza. Following protests at the opening night ceremony where protesters carr...