The films of Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy are a welcome reminder of how a reverence for and attention to classic tenets of filmmaking—indeed, to the rich history of cinema, both mainstream and independent—can still yield surprising, thrilling results.
As he is playing a film director trying desperately to get his next project off the ground, Vasyanovych’s presence imparts extra import to a film about how art can best speak to a politically charged moment.
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Silent Friend is most engaging in how it uses its broad scope to accrue a Wunderkammer of vaguely related niche subjects. The film’s conviction that its plants are full characters is best realized through its investigation into how changing technology opens new ways for humans to understand them.
In such difficult times, nostalgia remains a lifeblood for characters who risk losing themselves. Moonglow looks back down roads not taken, images and gestures emanating through the hazy humidity of the Manila night like cigarette smoke.
Although the film is constructed as a love letter to Alexander von Humboldt, it reveals something larger: the state of a nation that has abandoned his wisdom.
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.
"One of the big things that I want people to take away is the beauty of human connection, like a one-on-one connection with someone, just a phone call. It's so simple, and now we're just so saturated with technology."
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.
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.
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.