This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
The Club isn’t content to present a simple litany of crimes connecting the church with the Pinochet dictatorship.
Thom Andersen approaches pre-existing footage as an increasingly viable option when it comes to affordable experimentation in the digital age.
The festival has more in common with its mega-corporate Coca-Cola sponsor than it might like to think.
The festival succeeded in creating what director Lee Yong-kwan called “the window to the world for Asian films.”
Once the wave hits, everything that follows is submerged by the blatant bid for an international audience and the crowd-pleasing clichés the film emulates almost too well.
Harsh punishments are dished out in a way that jolts the material away from coming-of-age cliché.
This festival in Galicia, northwest Spain, demonstrates a canny knack for curating thematically coherent shorts programs, emphasizing quality over quantity.
Like its protagonist, this disquieting debut slips into a state of sulfurous rage from which it never relaxes.
Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth is most compelling when advancing its familiar plot through associative editing.
It’s a total turn-off that’s neither as lewdly subversive or as raucously debauched as its provocative title.
In addition to new works by auteurs new and old, the festival is once again rich in sidebars and special events that aren’t to be missed.
Those expecting it to be one of To’s manic comedies will instead be met with arguably his most dour drama.
If Ben Rivers brutalizes its artist’s ego, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film takes a more sardonic look at vanity.
Sunset Song is conventionally A-to-B, though it’s a strangely freeing framework within which Terence Davies achieves some gorgeously subtle effects.
It explicitly identifies its cinematic lineage and constantly refers back to a prestigious crime-film tradition.
At times, The Witch’s minimalist chill becomes too diffuse for its own good.
Light in darkness and darkness in light; for every affirmative moment, Frederick Wiseman finds a complementary negative.
One of Hou’s constant themes (one that recurs in the work of many of the notable Taiwanese directors) is alienation, not just of a personal, but of a national sort.
It’s with a combination of curiosity, excitement, and concern that one approaches a new project by such an obvious talent as Lois Patiño.
How wonderful it is to watch a film that pays attention to life’s finer textures.