This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
Fassbinder’s direct style creates vagueries in the film that become all the more unsettling the longer you consider them.
Klaus Kinski’s infamous intensity and lunacy are both on vivid display in Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savior.
Magalie Pichon in Bas-fonds is a force of nature.
In contemporary Shanghai, Jia has located a nexus of past and future and, predictably, he’s more interested in the rubble than the glamour.
An appealing little oddball of a movie, Septien is ironic yet genuinely sweet.
It resolves its thicket of mature moral questions in the most glib and banal means possible.
The film finds Joe Swanberg plumbing the same tired issues, albeit from a slightly older perspective.
Ideology and action become hypnotic bedfellows in 13 Assassins.
Maybe Xavier Dolan’s sophomore effort Heartbeats hit me at exactly the right time in life.
John Sayles’s human mosaics have always sparked hope for the salvation of American independent film.
Outrage always juxtaposes the unsettling action with a beautifully crisp formalism that makes the film increasingly disturbing.
True love sweeps into a person’s life like a volatile weather system, bringing with it an exhilarating sense of hope and possibility.
While both films are stylistically and narratively audacious, they couldn’t be more different in tone.
It’s as if everyone in Aardvark, blind or not, is feeling their way through the world in completely different ways.
The savvy filmgoer will target those films without distribution.
One of the final mysteries Werner Herzog evokes is what, if anything, albino alligators, who populate a neighboring arboretum, dream of.
It turns out the ghosts in the shadows and the monsters with red eyes aren’t horrific enemies, but different versions of our best and worst selves.
Abu Dhabi is a city that paints a big smile for tourists, and one that exists where and as you care to see it.
House of Suh looks into the eyes of a young murderer and finds an evolving mystery yet to be solved.
The documentary is an exploration (in 3D!) of the Chauvet Caves, an area that Herzog identifies as the place “where the modern human soul was awakened.”