More sprawling and every bit as gripping as its Oscar-shortlisted predecessor, Julia Loktev's six-hour epic My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile tracks a dozen dissident Russian journalists, mostly women, as they flee Moscow in 2022 after being branded "foreign agents." Seamlessly assembled across several
Circulating for decades as an undecipherably murky bootleg of outsized reputation, E. Elias Merhige’s experimental 1989 landmark Begotten has no dialogue or recognizable psychologies (credited characters include "God Killing Himself" and "Son of Earth – Flesh on Bone"), but possesses a violently abstract beauty to slice
People-watching in New York, poking around gorgeous apartments... location scouting must be a dream job, no? First-time filmmaker Paula González-Nasser spent six years knocking on strangers' doors and charming her way into private spaces. The Scout, her quietly enthralling corrective of slowly accumulating indignities, follows her
The eponymous mastermind of HBO's "How To with John Wilson," who turned quotidian NYC observation into some of the funniest, most sneakily profound TV of the decade, now explores permanence, fragility and mortality through the gray stuff under our feet. Wilson knows his absurd premise shouldn&
South Korean writer-director Na Hong-jin's Hope is a monster movie that refuses to behave. His long-awaited follow-up to 2015's shamanic folk-horror The Wailing takes us to a rural village near the DMZ, where a sheriff (Hwang Jung-min) discovers half the
What if you could photograph the past? That's the vertiginous premise of Jack Auen and Kevin Walker's Chronovisor, a singular spellbinder turning the act of research into a riveting noir conspiracy. A Columbia scholar (Anne-Laure Sellier) stumbles upon the story of a Benedictine monk who
Class war is just another day at the country club in Rafael Manuel's visually witty, quietly devastating debut Filipiñana—my absolute fave from Sundance this year. At an exclusive golf course outside of Manila, the film unfolds in leisurely deadpan tableaux (some have cited Wes Anderson, but I&
Lithuanian filmmaker Andrius Blaževičius' Sundance-winning dramedy How to Divorce During the War is a bitterly comic portrait of brittle relationships and bourgeois complacency that reminded me of Force Majeure. Just as a Vilnius family's breadwinner (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) chooses the worst possible moment to inform her
Contained thrillers are a staple of modest-budget filmmaking, those tense stories built around an economical, manageable setting... but who needs another cabin in the woods? A lean, mean chamber mystery that makes a virtue of its claustrophobic confines, Brock Bodell's feature debut Hellcat introduces us to a
In his tender, deeply New York sophomore feature Late Fame, former NYFF director and critic Kent Jones adapts Arthur Schnitzler's 1895 novella (from a ruthlessly funny script by May December's Samy Burch) about a forgotten poet given a second act by a group of young admirers.
A furious DIY fusion of hip-hop spectacle, political commentary and Afrofuturist dystopia, Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome was the first feature directed by a Black woman to be distributed in the UK, except the savage critics couldn't feel its gravity in 1995. Finally getting
Manhunter: The Final Cut is maybe a misnomer, as the 40th anniversary restoration of Michael Mann's unsettling serial-killer classic is essentially his 2003 Director's Cut with minor trims, extended scenes, and a polarizing color grade that mutes the film's iconic '80s neon
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With a deadpan melancholy to rival Aki Kaurismäki's oeuvre, Carolina Cavalli's The Kidnapping of Arabella is so tonally precarious that it could be called an absurdist buddy comedy, a coming-of-age drama, or a psychological portrait of delusional regret. A chance encounter convinces an aimless
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With the street-level chaos of Kids, the vibey nihilism of Spring Breakers and the analog grime of Trash Humpers, of course Harmony Korine's production shingle (skateboard company?) EDGLRD is behind Barrio Triste. A gang of disaffected teens steals a TV reporter's Betacam to document their
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Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee once set out to trace General Sherman's destructive Civil War path to the sea. Then his girlfriend dumped him. Growing richer, smoother and more complex 40 years later, McElwee's hilarious and humane Sherman's March has aged like a fine Carolina
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An offbeat hybrid of animation and live action, Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki's autofictional delight Bouchra renders New York City as a CGI-veneered zootopia of anthropomorphized bears, lizards and cows. A lesbian Moroccan filmmaker (presenting as a bipedal coyote, voiced by Bennani) traces her creative blocks and
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Somehow evoking mid-century melodramas, Lifetime psychodramas, Showgirls, as well as Elizabeth Berkeley's diet-pill spiral in that "Saved by the Bell" episode, Maddie's Secret is a delicious treat that doesn't follow comedy recipes. In his directorial debut, cult funnyman John Early
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Buster Keaton begat Jackie Chan, who begat The Raid, which begat John Wick. You're now caught up on the kinetic lineage of stunt coordinator-turned-filmmaker Kenji Tanigaki's Hong Kong action brawler The Furious ("Huo zhe yan"), an electrifying cult classic in the making.
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I joked after the Cannes Fatherland premiere that I'd pay to watch Sandra Hüller read my utility bills, which means Robert Petit's visually immersive jaw-dropper Underland — a phantasmagorical docu-essay on subterranean exploration, poetically narrated by Hüller — is a theatrical must-see. Jumping off from