Review: “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person”

It’s always refreshing to witness a new take on a well-worn genre. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, the feature directorial debut of Montreal-based director and co-writer Ariane Louis-Seize, doesn’t exactly contain any vampire movie tropes we haven’t seen before. It’s a little bit of a teen movie, a little bit of a horror film, […]

Tribeca Review: “1-800-ON-HER-OWN”

It’s difficult to condense a whole life into one feature-length film. Dana Flor’s 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, a documentary centering on 90s folk music icon Ani DiFranco, wisely chooses to focus primarily on just one segment of her subject’s very full life and career. The issue, however, is that Flor concentrates on arguably the most banal period of […]

Tribeca Review: “Arzé”

In the opening shots of Arzé, director Mira Shaib and cinematographer Heyjin Jun track their title character (played by Diamond Abou Abboud) through the streets of Beirut as she runs errands, capturing the bustling energy of the city in a way that points toward the kinetic pace that will fast pervade the rest of the […]

Tribeca Review: “New Wave”

When Elizabeth Ai set out to make her documentary New Wave, it was to strictly be a film about the music phenomenon that originated in Orange County, California in the 1980s. The city’s Little Saigon area saw a large influx of Vietnamese immigrants relocating due to the Vietnam War, and the trend capitalized on that […]

Tribeca Review: “Missing From Fire Trail Road”

At the end of 2020, Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, a resident of the Tulalip Indian reservation outside Seattle, vanished in plain sight. Her husband, a white man with whom she had reportedly been experiencing some marital issues, reported her disappearance to the authorities and then washed his hands of the matter. Officially, the investigation is at […]

Review: “The People’s Joker”

If I regret one thing about my experience covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, it’s returning my ticket for the Midnight Madness world premiere of Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. My reasons for doing so have nothing to do with the film itself; as a lifelong Batman fan and a bonafide hater of Todd […]

Review: “Love Lies Bleeding”

As soon as reclusive Lou (Kristen Stewart) glimpses statuesque body builder Jackie (Katy O’Brien) from across the gym she manages, we know she’s sunk. The way director Rose Glass allows the camera to absorb this expression of desire, and the sensuous way she lingers on the body, tracing every line of Jackie’s muscular frame, are […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “There Was, There Was Not,” “1489”

Displacement has been a common theme across many of the films I’ve watched at this year’s True/False Film Festival, the annual event in Columbia, Missouri celebrating nonfiction filmmaking, and with the current genocide unfolding in Palestine, each of them feels particularly urgent. Coincidentally, two Armenian films by women documenting the Artsakh War and the way […]

Berlinale Dispatch: “Dahomey,” “My Stolen Planet,” “Hands in the Fire”

For this dispatch from the 74th Berlinale, I’m looking at three films (coincidentally all directed by women) that merge history and filmmaking. Mati Diop’s magnificent Dahomey and Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet both operate in the nonfiction sphere, while Portuguese director Margarida Gil’s Hands in the Fire is a loose adaptation of Henry […]

Review: “Bye Bye Tiberias”

Hiam Abbass craved escape. At least, that’s what she remembers. As she rifles through a stack of letters she wrote to her parents shortly after her mother’s passing, she is specifically searching for the one she penned to explain to them why she left home, because she can’t quite recall what she said in it. […]