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. […]

Review: “Origin”

Origin is about as ambitious an adaptation imaginable. It’s a fitting project for director Ava DuVernay, who—whether working in narrative features or documentaries or television— has always swung for the fences. Her film is based on journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which posits that racism in the United […]

Review: “Saltburn”

Gloomy atmosphere, haunted castles, grotesque characters, cursed families, doomed romances— these elements and more have come to define the gothic genre, the first entry into which is generally considered to be English writer Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. Walpole’s tale of the lord of a manor and his family was inspired by […]

SLIFF Review: “La Chimera”

The most recognizable definition of a chimera comes from Greek mythology, in reference to a female creature made up of several different animals: a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. But the word can alternately be used as a noun to refer to something one hopes for, but is impossible to ever […]

Home Video Review: “The Unknown Country”

The snow crunches beneath her feet as Tana (Lily Gladstone) steps into her car. She pauses as she glances at the handicapped tag hanging on the rearview mirror before quietly removing it. A voice on the radio details the perilous weather conditions, but as night turns to day and the snow becomes blindingly white, Tana […]

SLIFF Review: “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt”

Hands. That’s the first thing you notice about Raven Jackson’s debut feature film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt: the close-up of Mack’s hands as she runs them through the river water, sifting through the dirt with her fingers, as her father Isaiah (Chris Chalk) teaches her how to fish, patiently telling her to go […]

Review: “Anatomy of a Fall”

“I really wanted to address the legal issue in its smallest details, to address the issues of the couple, of living together. It was also a pretext to dissect every bit of their life.” Justine Triet stated the above to the magazine Paris Match following the world premiere of her courtroom drama Anatomy of a […]

Review: “Priscilla”

I didn’t put two and two together until I was standing in the hotel lobby. The same day I was set to go see Priscilla— Sofia Coppola’s screen adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me— I was checking into a hotel, a charming relic of Route 66’s heyday in southwest Missouri. As I […]