By Hazem Fahmy | April 12, 2024

The Zellners do not lean into such a crude comparison, yet it is hard not to read the dissolution of the cryptid community as an echo of the real-life devastation settler-colonialism has wrought on this continent’s peoples.

This film is incendiary, but it should be discussed not just for its controversy. What makes this film significant is how it engages with the iconography of IP superhero blockbuster cinema and with the trans film image.

By Adam Nayman | March 29, 2024

There is nothing new under the sun in the films of Alice Rohrwacher, which pay their respects to the beauty and mystery of older civilizations while suggesting that exploitation—of people, and of physical and spiritual resources— is almost as ancient as the world itself.

By Frank Falisi | March 27, 2024
First Look 2024

The village first drew Zhang Mengqi back as a subject in filmmaker Wu Wenguang’s Folk Memory Project, a collection of oral histories from people who lived through the Great Famine.

By Lawrence Garcia | March 21, 2024

Like Godard, Radu Jude is acutely aware of how every image or sequence of images can be sorted into genres, textures, colors, references, and so on, categories whose associations stretch back into the whole of cinema’s past.

By Jasmine Liu | March 21, 2024
First Look 2024

Being lost is a condition of possibility, which the film’s characters practice half with intention and half by circumstance.

By Adam Nayman | March 19, 2024

That the output of Fessenden over four decades has been taken for granted is one thing, but it is more like his being taken for granted has itself been taken for granted, as grimly self-fulfilling as any dark prophecy about pentagrams and the need to stay off the moors.

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.