Materna Review: A Viscerally Immersive Yet Broad Look at Womanhood
Materna opens with hazy close-ups of four women on the New York subway, all distracted and on edge. As we’ll come to learn, that’s partly from events in each o...
Orla Smith
No Ordinary Man Review: Transgender History Gets Illuminated in Vital Documentary
In 1998, Dianne Middlebrook published Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, and the narrative around Billy Tipton’s life was warped. The truth was that Ti...
Scales Review: A Feminist Fable High on Metaphorical Imagery
Scales is the latest in a movement of feminist cinema coming from Saudi Arabia, in the wake of great work done by Haifaa Al-Mansour (whose excellent The Perfec...
The Perfect Candidate Review: Haifaa Al-Mansour Examines Misogyny in Saudi Arabia with Political Crowdpleaser
A lot has changed in Saudi Arabia since Haifaa Al-Mansour last made a film in her home country. Wadjda, Al-Mansour’s 2012 debut, was the first feature shot ent...
Profile Review: Timur Bekmambetov’s Thriller is the Best ScreenLife Film Yet
In 2015, French journalist Anna Érelle published In the Skin of a Jihadist: Inside Islamic State’s Recruitment Networks. In order to investigate ISIS recruitme...
Berlin Review: What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? Appreciates the Little Things
What did the drain pipe, the security camera, and the sapling say to the girl when she crossed the road? This is the set up, not of some shitty joke, but of a ...
Berlin Review: Memory Box Unpacks Life During the Lebanese Civil War
One of two films at the 2021 Berlinale about the lasting trauma of the Lebanese Civil War (along with the superior Miguel’s War), Memory Box follows three gene...
Berlin Review: Petite Maman is Céline Sciamma’s Warm, Delicate Portrait of Mother-Daughter Love
After the ambitious and wildly popular Portrait of a Lady on Fire shot Céline Sciamma into the arthouse stratosphere, she has returned with her fifth feature, ...
Slamdance Review: A Brixton Tale Explores Filmmaking Ethics and Gentrification in Morally Straightforward Ways
For their first feature, A Brixton Tale, filmmaking team Darragh Carey and Bertrand Desrochers set themselves a trap. It’s a film about filmmaking ethics—who g...
Slamdance Review: Me to Play Grapples with Real-Life Mortality Through a Samuel Beckett Play
In 2012, veteran New York actors Chris Jones and Dan Moran staged an off-Broadway production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The play, a black comedy about two ag...
