Karl Marx’ oft-cited quip about how history repeats itself, “first as a tragedy, second as a farce,” could easily apply to Special Operation, Oleksiy…
It all starts with a bang. Sirât immerses itself into a spectacular DIY rave in the Moroccan desert, before its narrative kicks off proper.…
“Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly!” — not a surrealist pamphlet upon obvious improvements to the…
Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker invested in making sense of our current technology-driven world. His camera frame often has live action footage sharing the…
Josef von Sternberg always had a materialistic streak — it was a necessity to produce the kind of effects he was chasing. He never…
The soldiers of Roberto Minervini’s The Damned play cards, wander around, and casually debate theology. The year is 1862, and these Union soldiers find…
Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, currently in U.S. theaters after initially premiering nearly a year ago at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in…
It makes sense that Joel Potrykus has remained a Michigan filmmaker his entire career. His rebellious, don’t-ask-permission attitude is right at home in a…
The two sequences that form the beginning of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April set a mood of violent unease. We follow a faceless creature, vaguely humanoid…
After 2021’s El Planeta, Amalia Ulman ups the ante with her second feature, Magic Farm, in every conceivable way. Black-and-white cinematography here gives way…
I was not surprised that I was deeply charmed by young Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills To Pay, which screened at this year’s New…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy…
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is an impressionistic look at a small beach town in South Florida awaiting a large Hurricane to pass through.…
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning…
“Everywhere animals disappear,” wrote art critic John Berger in his seminal book Why Look at Animals? Berger proposed an argument from capitalism, where the…
Miguel Gomes first began to build attention in the United States with his film Our Beloved Month of August in 2008. Since then, the…
Film has always stood in tense relation to history: it both creates and consumes it. Often, it does both simultaneously. Steve Erickson’s book Days…