Reviewing the 14th edition of First Look, Museum of the Moving Image's annual festival showcasing adventurous new cinema.

By Savina Petkova | March 14, 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.

By Natalia Keogan | March 14, 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.

By Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer | March 14, 2025

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.

By David Schwartz | March 13, 2025

Lina intuitively understands that the anguish the time with her father will cause her is part of the price for a film that exposes in stark terms the workings and results of toxic masculinity.

By Chloe Lizotte | March 13, 2025

When compressed to a dry-sounding logline, The Shipwrecked Triptych is an anthology film about postwar German cultural identity and social exclusion; Eroglu is Danish-Turkish and was educated in Berlin, which frames his perspective on the country. But the film is not a history lesson.