Visits to cinema showcases around the world

By Kelli Weston | September 20, 2021

Several films on view continued to reckon, indirectly or otherwise, and to varying degrees of success, with our era of disrupted intimacy and heightened loneliness. Titles include Quickening, The Humans, and The Power of the Dog.

By Jordan Cronk | July 27, 2021

Certain forms are still anathema to what constitutes serious cinema, and that changes in approach, personnel, or temperament are acceptable so long as they do not disrupt our preconceived notions of the author’s vision.

By Jordan Cronk | July 14, 2021

Tender where most films of its kind are tough, Greet Freedom is nonetheless unflinching in its emotional honesty and highly detailed in its artistry. Also reviewed: Annette and Intregalde.

By Sarah Fonseca | July 14, 2021

Verhoeven wants us to know who the real perverse parties are here, and he avoids charges of blasphemy in Benedetta by mining the history of the Catholic Church in rigorous, drippy excess. Also reviewed: Anais in Love, Bergman Island, Small Body, Three Floors.

By Ela Bittencourt | April 1, 2021

The curators ask in the program notes, Can remembrance fix a broken world? At the core of this inquiry into the world, and the status of the human within its historical, sociopolitical, technological, and ecological parameters, lies the emphasis on feeling.

By Nicholas Russell | February 9, 2021

There was a fair amount of expectation for this year’s Midnight selections to contain the next iteration of meaningful, shocking, or gossip-inspiring titles that could also be talked about as layered, complex examinations of real-world issues.

By Susannah Gruder | February 5, 2021

In their ambivalence and open-endedness, these films paradoxically brought me closer to a kind of emotional release than any other films in the festival, managing to capture our current state of uninterrupted dread and malaise in a way that feels comfortingly familiar.

By Nicholas Russell | February 4, 2021

This year there wasn’t as much awkwardness in the form of glitchy, poorly synced Zoom interviews, as one might have expected, though the same can’t be said for the sometimes verbose, overly grave ways that some filmmakers talked about their projects.

By Chloe Lizotte | April 2, 2020

With hand sanitizer presence at venues and travelers carrying packs of alcohol wipes, we were aware that life was in the process of reconfiguring itself, but it didn’t quite seem real yet.

By Bedatri D. Choudhury | February 7, 2020

Coded Bias, Time, and A Thousand Cuts are films made by women of color about women of color who have had enough with the status quo and taken it upon themselves to demand justice on their own terms.

By Susannah Gruder | January 29, 2020

While I tend to chafe at categorizing directors based on gender, each of these films is richer as a result of their lived experience as women, and the particular struggle of searching for agency in a world that limits it.

By Tayler Montague | October 26, 2019

As a viewer and participant, I was increasingly aware that the objective of the festival was to be a space in which we questioned and looked closely at the historical work and power imbalances that have long existed within the documentary form.

By Lawrence Garcia | September 19, 2019

Eloy Enciso’s Endless Night, Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever,Affonso Uchôa’s Seven Years in May, Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Krabi, 2562, James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s This Action Lies, Annie MacDonell’s Book of Hours, Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, and more

By Tayler Montague | March 21, 2018

Filmmakers are actively pushing up against what it means to make a documentary at all, and the True/False Film Festival caters to and nurtures that objective. I am especially thankful to True/False for exposing me to new possibilities for Black cinema.