Sure, I make films as an artistic pursuit as an artist, but I make films to help my characters, my friends first.

By Clara Cuccaro | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

Shot on a combination of MiniDV, Betacam, and 16mm, Arthur&Diana is laden with nostalgic references. Locations are filmed in color with a handheld camera evoking the Dogme 95 movement.

By Chris Shields | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

Midi Z’s film, shot between 2017 and 2023, documents the period leading up to the 2021 coup by the Tatmadaw—Myanmar’s military—that deposed the democratically elected National League for Democracy and installed a military junta.

Prayers for the Stolen showed her preternatural knack for filming space and time in a realist mode, but Tatiana Huezo's approach to her latest work is even more impressive.

By Julia Gunnison | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

Delineating a war requires accounting for tremendous complexity and historical context that’s difficult to capture in 120 minutes. But as this film conveys, the best storytellers are the city streets.

By Mark Asch | March 17, 2024
First Look 2024

The film is another of brothers Bill and Turner Ross’s immersions in the regional euphoric...The filmmakers are after a kind of Herzogian ecstatic truth, often to be found in the kinds of spaces where someone is likely to be rolling on literal ecstasy.

By Michael Sicinski | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

Forgoing any touristic impulse, Patiño takes his cues from filmmakers such as Peter Hutton and especially Mark LaPore, charting not only the people and places before him but also his fundamental distance from those environments.

By Vikram Murthi | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

The Featherweight actively engages with core ideas behind direct cinema and verité, residing in a blurry middle ground between the two genres, that is between minimizing a documentarian’s presence and actively participating in the action.

By Emma Ward | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

Vardanyan weaves back and forth between depictions of creation and destruction, presence and absence, the emotional and the bureaucratic. That these apparent paradoxes coexist onscreen emphasizes the incomprehensibility of the family’s situation as a whole.

By Keva York | March 16, 2024
First Look 2024

There is this diffusion to the image projected on the glass. The glass has this inherent texture, and the way color looks on it is not natural… it’s not quite like Technicolor, maybe more like two-strip Technicolor, or even some early hand-colored things.

By Sarah Fensom | March 15, 2024
First Look 2024

Philly Abe is not just a beleaguered downtown tenant fighting rapid gentrification, she’s also an avatar for a fading New York.

By Hannah Bonner | March 15, 2024
First Look 2024

The full scale of our emotions is cinematically clarified throughout these 13 films, chronicling a continuous transmutation of feeling into thought.

By Chris Shields | March 14, 2024
First Look 2024

Whereas the towering novel from which it takes its name, a timely meditation on the political and cultural environment in Europe leading up to the first world war, lives largely in its characters, Chachia and Voigt’s film, instead, personifies the “magic mountain” itself to unique and ghostly effect.

By David Schwartz | March 14, 2024
First Look 2024

Drawing inspiration from Resnais’s film and Lem’s novel (but mostly from the latter), the Polish director, film professor, and cineaste Kuba Mirkuda has created in Solaris Mon Amour a one-of-a-kind archival masterwork.