France

Locarno 2025 Review: “God Will Not Help”

God Will Not Help, the sophomore feature from Croatian director Hana Jušić, is a poetic work on grief, faith, and the universal experiences of women within a patriarchal society. Led by powerful performances from its two stars Manuela Martelli as Teresa and Ana Marija Veselčić as Milena, the film explores how solidarity between the oppressed is able to form even in silence and cultural differences, and how it becomes their only shield against subjugation.

Locarno 2025 Review: “Mare’s Nest”

© Ben Rivers Ben Rivers’ Mare’s Nest is a thought-provoking and deeply imaginative post-apocalyptic eco-film that dares to put the future of humanity entirely in the hands of children. Featuring a cast composed exclusively of child actors, the film follows Moon Guo Barker, in an impressive performance as the character Moon, through a series ofContinue reading “Locarno 2025 Review: “Mare’s Nest””

Cannes 2025 Review: “Once Upon a Time in Gaza”

Set in Gaza in 2007, Once Upon a Time in Gaza is a complex genre-bending drama from the Nasser brothers that blurs the line between reality and cinema. Mixing noir, Western, and political satire, it follows the lives of Palestinians lived under the zionist blockade, where love and loyalty coexist with occupation and concept of martyrdom.

Cannes 2025 Review: “Nino”

Pauline Loques’ Nino unfolds in a compressed stretch of time, yet feels expansive in the weight and emotions it carries. The film follows a young man whose life is suddenly redirected by a serious medical diagnosis, depicting it through an educational, emotional yet unsentimental angle. Loques keeps the camera close to her character, allowing us to read shifts in breath, posture, and glance. The pace is quick in terms of events, but the emotional register is slow and deliberate, leaving space for the viewer to absorb the weight of the narrative.

Cannes 2025 Review: “Love Me Tender”

Anna Cazenave Cambet’s Love Me Tender is a radical portrait of the extent to which one’s attempt to free herself from heteronormativity is punished by society. Drawn from Clémentine Autain’s autobiography, it holds onto long stretches of the source text, letting the film’s voice stay personal, reflective, and grounded in lived detail. Vicky Krieps empowers the masterfully written screenplay with a transformative, unshowy performance that registers every shift in power and loss.

Visions du Réel 2025 Review: “Afternoons of Solitude”

Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude is a provocative, and unsettling documentary that explores the ‘art’ of bullfighting. While the ethicality of bullfighting hovers constantly over the film, Serra resists direct moralizing. He offers a raw, sensorial exploration of masculinity, performance, and spectacle, letting the audience sit with their own judgments. It becomes a strange, gorgeous character study of one man, bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and the hypermasculine, flamboyant culture that celebrates and consumes him.

Cinema du Réel 2025 Dispatch: Jessica Sarah Rinland, James Benning, Lee Anne Schmitt & More

Cinéma du Réel, the esteemed international documentary film festival held annually in Paris, France, has long been celebrated for its commitment to showcasing non-mainstream, intellectually, and artistically stimulating documentaries. The competition of the festival’s 2025 edition, running from March 21 to 30, continues this tradition by presenting a diverse program that blurs the lines between feature-length films and short shorts, treating each with equal reverence and attention. This egalitarian approach highlights the festival’s dedication to exploring the myriad forms and expressions within non-fiction cinema, providing a platform for both emerging and established filmmakers to present their unique visions.

Berlin 2025 Review: “No Beast. So Fierce.”

Burhan Qurbani’s No Beast. So Fierce. is a daring contemporary reimagining of Shakespeare’s Richard III, transforming the classic tale of ambition and treachery to the story of a woman among the gang-controlled streets of Berlin. The film centers on Arab lawyer Rashida York, portrayed with mesmerizing intensity by Kenda Hmeidan, as she maneuvers through a patriarchal underworld to seize power.

TIFF 2024 Review: “Horizonte”

César Augusto Acevedo, the acclaimed director behind “Land and Shade” (winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2015), returns with his long-awaited follow-up, “Horizonte,” a haunting and poetic exploration of loss, memory, and redemption. The film tells the story of two ghosts -a mother, Inés, and her son, Basilio- as they wander through a war-torn world in search of the man’s missing father. Their spiritual journey, traversing the desolate, misty landscapes of a city torn apart by conflict, uncovers the wounds left by war.

Venice 2024 Review: “Quiet Life”

“Quiet Life” by Alexandros Avranas, who won the Silver Lion award at the 2013 Venice Film Festival for his film “Miss Violence” is a gripping and oftentimes bitingly satirical exploration of a family’s struggle for asylum in 2018 in Sweden. The film follows Sergei (Grigoriy Dobrygin), his wife Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova), and their two daughters, who have fled Russia claiming persecution due to Sergei’s promotion of banned political texts at his school. The family’s hopes for a new beginning are crushed by the cold and harsh system of Swedish bureaucracy, which doubts the credibility of their story and dismisses their application for asylum, leading to a sudden medical emergency. Avranas presents a narrative where the family’s life is reduced to a series of inspections, interrogations, and regulations, all captured through a meticulously controlled and sterile lens.