The resulting tension undermines the initial project and becomes the subject of the film, revealing the uneasy power dynamics at play between filmmaker and participants.
The interpersonal drama gets at interrelated ideas of property ownership, kinship, and freedom (meaning either independence or loneliness), as the automotive sprawl of America’s built environment flows past.
He never went away, but Two Pianos feels like a triumphant return for Desplechin, a testament to his maturing style and the observable fact that he is still a filmmaker to be reckoned with.
Documenting the high-stakes Chocobar trial and unraveling the state’s deceptions requires a certain amount of linear and coherent storytelling, which Martel has traditionally resisted in her films.
Ken Jacobs turned daily life into mind-expanding perceptual adventures. It is fitting that his final long-form work is a record of his own haircut in Chinatown by his favorite barber, Shirley, at the V1 Hair Salon on 50 Bayard Street.
While expanding consciousness can be generative, it can also be discomforting, as the First Look 2026 avant-garde shorts program “Little Stabs” suggests. Deriving its name from Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), these twelve films encapsulate Jacobs’s “expansion of consciousness.”
In a perfect world, every family would have its own version of It Goes That Quick. This tender film from Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus captures the banality and the beauty of family with a cinematic flair that adds a distinct structural and artistic dimension to everyday conversations and events.
Just in my day-to-day life, if I am walking through the city at a very quick pace, I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of details. I might not notice that the flowers are blooming. Likewise, being in a movie theater and sitting still for a time allows a viewer to really be able to appreciate those small movements.
I tend to shoot quickly, so I always have a little extra time every day to be able to have these moments that we call “bonuses.” There are moments where I didn't end up using what was scripted and only used what was improvised.
The second of the Five Precepts in Tibetan Buddhism addresses stealing, advising practitioners not to take what has not been given. 100 Sunset is a wintry work of slow cinema, is a meditation on what is taken, what is freely given, and what cannot be returned.
The number in question features a remarkable cinematographic trick, imagining a Harlem nightclub where leggy chorines seamlessly change skin color from white to Black and back again, accompanied by a bluesy torch song played by a Black jazz orchestra.
It is impossible to imagine the film being made with live actors; if it were, it would lose a crucial source of tension. As so many key conversations in the film swirl around authenticity in artmaking and identity, it’s pointed for the film’s visuals to encourage you to question everything you are watching.
These explorations of the psychological effects of fame are mostly decorative, frequently splitting the difference between timeless and timeworn.
This humbling and quietly awe-inspiring first feature from Sophy Romvari could only half-accurately be described as an autobiographical coming-of-age drama . . . Her practice is grounded in the understanding that the real and the merely remembered are separated by the finest and slipperiest of lines.
To be honest, I think of Blue Heron as the origin story of all my films and life. My previous works were all trying to process things that happened relatively more recently, and Blue Heron in a way is what led to all those things. My brother is the beginning of our family’s stories.