What makes IFFR so endearing is an atmosphere that’s joyful and devoid of self-importance.
One might say that the IFFR puts the “jaws of life” to the test on cinema.
Feelings are unutterable and intimacy unbearable in the Japan depicted in Kudo Riho’s Let Me Hear It Barefoot.
Death and childhood haunt Pénélope My Love and Malintzin 17.
A number of notable films at IFFR this year are concerned with our digital lives and people trying to survive in a fractured world.
Both films, part of the festival’s Tiger Competition, bask in philosophical and erotic consequences of illness.
It’s difficult to imagine Rotterdam as a place where a film festival isn’t taking place at all times.
The festival’s program has never felt so scattered, a sensation that I found delightful.
The 45th edition of IFFR will be the first in nine years without current artistic director Rutger Wolfson at the helm.
As fundamental to The Island of St. Matthews as the landscape may be, the faces reign supreme.
The 40-odd festival titles I caught at Rotterdam this year offered consistent amazement.
Hell on Earth? Not quite.
Walter Hugo Khouri is an undervalued master.
The Pornographer is exemplary of the Boca do Lixo’s comic style, much of which revolves around fantasy.
The Red Light Bandit is an electric, legendary movie, one Brazilian cinephiles know practically by heart.
It’s certainly ambitious in its attempt to reveal the dark underbelly of much of today’s comedy.
The films we consider historically vital are usually films we can easily see.
The story of Boca do Lixo filmmaking began a few years before any of its movies.
The film is as modest and self-explanatory as its lower-case title suggests.
It strives for a handheld immediacy and raw emotional power that it only intermittently achieves.