A few minutes into Donal Foreman’s The Image You Missed, a voice-over comes to an abrupt stop: “each film is a mission impossible, but this one here, it was the...
Contrasts abound in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s terrifyingly captivating Good Manners, a horror-meets-children’s-movie that uses all the tropes at its dispo...
A few minutes into Helena Wittmann’s Drift, two young ladies sit at a bar and recount an old myth from Papua New Guinea. It’s an anecdote of the world’s creatio...
The past is a home country in Corsica-born French director Thierry de Peretti’s second feature, A Violent Life. A crime saga chronicling Corsica’s gruesome 1990...
There must be something really frightening in a 50-year-old woman deciding to give up her role as diligent housewife and mother, especially when it is the only ...
Sadaf Foroughi’s fulminating debut feature, Ava, may strike a few chords among Persepolis enthusiasts. A role-model schoolgirl turned rebel, its eponymous teena...
The characters populating Ilian Metev’s 3/4 (read: Three Quarters) often walk and talk in pairs, but they are seldom framed together, the camera lingering on ea...
Long before “Galang” and “Paper Planes," and prior to her Oscar nomination and universal fame, there was a time M.I.A. was Mathangi Arulpragasam, the daughter o...
An Italian-born, UK-raised film critic, Leonardo Goi is an alumnus of the Locarno Critics Academy and Berlinale Talents, where he coordinates the Talent Press. Along with The Film Stage, he writes for MUBI, Senses of Cinema, and Kinoscope. For reviews and reports from the festival circuit, follow him on Twitter at @LeonardoGoi.
