review
By Leonardo Goi | March 28, 2025

For a tale of doomed love and excruciating loneliness, the sixth feature from Miguel Gomes is not powered by sorrow so much as an inordinate fondness for the world, a film where director and characters alike seem determined to find beauty in the most unexpected places.

interview
By Marya E. Gates | March 27, 2025

I had the image of these two coal miners in the dark kissing. I think this is because I am always interested in the spirituality of Earth, of the depth of Earth. There is something very spiritual in that. And this film is about home and leaving home.

review
By Leonardo Goi | March 20, 2025

The intention here was to make an erotic film without relying on or showing sexual acts. That was something I told myself from the very beginning: no one will make love this time.

feature
By Hannah Bonner | March 16, 2025
First Look 2025

Each of the eleven filmmakers activates celluloid’s formal potentials while also negotiating the tensions among technologies that irrevocably alter our world—and ways of seeing.

feature, review
By Dan Schindel | March 16, 2025
First Look 2025

The aesthetic looseness feels like an appropriate evocation of the anything-goes sensibility of childhood, as well as the pedagogical nature of the educational milieu.

feature, review
By Mark Asch | March 16, 2025
First Look 2025

Diciannove, the first film by Giovanni Tortorici, who is not yet out his twenties, speaks to the psychic undercurrents of our fresh Hell, while also carrying on a dialogue with the traditions of European romanticism in literature and film.

review, feature
By Sarah Fensom | March 16, 2025
First Look 2025

Though Measures of a Funeral is a lushly photographed, globe-trotting saga that runs nearly two and a half hours, its bones are that of an essay film.

feature, review
By Michael Sicinski | March 16, 2025
First Look 2025

The more personal A Want in Her gets, the less it feels like a document constructed with a prospective viewer in mind, and so the result is edifying and intrusive in equal measure.

feature, review
By Michael Sicinski | March 15, 2025
First Look 2025

The film is an object that unfurls a bit like a complex piece of classical music. Zhao introduces forms and motifs in order to stretch them to the limits of intelligibility. Before you’re even aware of it, Periphery has already moved on to some other idea.

review, feature
By Vikram Murthi | March 15, 2025
First Look 2025

A vague pre-apocalyptic tension courses through the docu-style footage of Monaco at night, where sparkling lights only serve to highlight the desolation, as well as the cavernous yet claustrophobic domestic interiors, which feel like they are on the verge of swallowing inhabitants whole.

feature, review

All we see, throughout the 72 minutes of A Frown Gone Mad, are bloody faces and the back of Bouba’s arm administering the shots. But the specter of war and death in the Lebanese capital hovers like a shroud.

review, feature
By Chris Shields | March 15, 2025
First Look 2025

The film asks its audience to question the very nature of narratives, of artifice, of truth, fiction, and the mechanisms artists use to achieve their ends.

interview, feature
By Natalia Keogan | March 14, 2025
First Look 2025

Despite its anxious and melancholic air, When the Phone Rang also captures the golden haze of youth, with its moments of whimsy and wonder . . . not even a raging war can compare, at times, to the monumental mortification of pubescence.

feature, review

His films occlude the presence of human labor and consumption. Instead, he spotlights the empty, spaceship-like labs and warehouses where meat of all kinds is processed or artificially created before it is packaged by automated robots and sent off to supermarkets.

review, feature
By Savina Petkova | March 14, 2025
First Look 2025

Windless is rigorously pictorial with centrally composed shots and the linear perspective of Renaissance art, where the relative size, shape, and position of objects is organized around imagined lines converging at a point on the horizon. But even though the film upholds those conventions, it also makes room for the character to resist or break them.