The 51st Chicago International Film Festival blends big ticket premieres, festival favorites from 2015, and obscure international debuts from around the globe. I haven’t seen all of the 120+ films showing at the fest this year, not even close, but I’m excited to share a few of my favorites from what I have seen ahead […]
The latest from New German Cinema director Wim Wenders, Every Thing Will Be Fine is a film which walks an unbelievably dangerous line between ‘outright bad’ and ‘self-consciously analytical.’ A dangerous line walked on a tightrope a hundred feet in the air, and in 3D, no less. After a string of documentaries, Wenders has finally returned to […]
A triumphant return from the annals of obscure near-incomprehensibility for director Peter Greenaway, but still rife with his trademark challenges like nudity, philosophical conversations, and vomit, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is an intellectual treat if you can handle the meat.
Growing up is never the easiest thing in the world. Growing up a girl can prove especially difficult in certain parts of the world. In Sworn Virgin, that particular part of the world is Albania, and growing up means a struggle to make sense of traditional gender roles. A tale of two sisters, the film […]
A cinematic tome for the ages, Alexey German Jr.’s Pod elektricheskimi oblakami (Under Electric Clouds) is a visual and intellectual delight brimming with big ideas, melancholy, and cultural reference points. Told in seven chapters and exploring different moments in time, there is a circular structure to it involving a set of characters always looking to the past and […]
If you’re the type that likes end credit sequences that start with the words “TERRENCE MALICK PRESENTS” set to a Native American rap track, then The Seventh Fire is the documentary you’ve been waiting for. A slice-of-life story about living on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, The Seventh Fire slowly reveals the extent to […]
Tonight marked the closing ceremonies of the Berlinale 2015. Despite the existence of tomorrow’s repeat screenings, this was effectively the end of the festival. At this point, I had seen all the competition titles I could and the ones I still wanted to see were no longer screening (except for an already sold-out repeat of El […]
Berlinale 2015 had an incredible amount of screenings to offer. As such, I wasn’t able to begin to see everything, or even everything I’d hoped to see, but I was very lucky to get to see as much as I did. Three of the big winning films were ones I didn’t manage to see (45 […]
