The Vast of Night takes a big gamble in both visual style and storytelling structure, and it hits the jackpot. This close look at a small town’s flirtation with the unknown shows how small stories can have big rewards.
A Great Lamp is the first feature by director Saad Qureshi. While much of it feels like a first voyage and a grand gesture to make a strong impression, the film’s raw emotions make for a humanizing tale of two strangers just...
As riveting as the recent Fyre Fest documentaries have been, Desolation Center shows us that there’s some heart and soul in the history of music festivals.
The Beksińskis. A Sound and Picture Album is a documentary based on a book by Magdalena Grzebałkowska, which is based on the life of painter Zdzislaw Beksinski. A collection of home videos, news footage, diary entries, and essays,...
Lost Holiday seems to fancy itself some sort of crime drama or buddy comedy. I’m not saying that it’s neither, but it does seem to suffer from a lack of passion in its characters, just as those characters suffer from a...
Impetus is nearly impossible to categorize – not because it defies genre, rather it tries to occupy too many of them at once. Fiction, biography, autobiography, documentary and metatextuality all factor heavily into this self-indu...
Hurry Slowly is the rare film that focuses its attention on the quiet times leading up to a major life change, and not the change itself. It’s slow, contemplative, and methodical in its examination of one young woman’s...
Crystal Swan is the official submission from Belarus to the Academy Awards this year, a recognition that it rightly deserves. The film is smart and steeped in decades of Belarusian history, and yet it features relatable characters...
