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It’s at the tail of its closing credit scroll that “Ancestors” drops its final, plainly worded message, also setting its title in context: “No survivors, only descendants.” As the sign-off for this heartbroken drama of connections made and lost as AIDS ravaged London’s queer community in the late 1980s, it’s a lyrical rejoinder to anyone […]
A new impact fund backing creators from the Global South launched at the recently concluded first edition of the Toronto Film Festival market, with a model built around getting films in front of audiences as well as getting them made. The Culture Fund was established by Product of Culture, a media, marketing and distribution company […]
Despite the generic title, “Voices” is quite the novelty. Mixing the rarely combined genres of chamber thriller and musical, the film takes place almost entirely in one location — a Detroit motel room in 1967 — and focuses on just three characters. The actors start singing at the most tense moments, puncturing the perception that, […]
Expanding on his 2021 short film, Theja Rio’s debut feature “Angh” forces its way into the hidden crevices between indigenous identity and colonial modernity. This tension unfolds with riveting restraint in a story set in 1960s Nagaland — the eastern Indian state on the Burmese border — following the principled chief of a waning tribe, […]
In an era when glamorous writing jobs have acquired the unreality of folklore, it feels fitting that Alexandra Pechman’s alluring and affectionate feature debut, “Magazine,” should portray its literary world as a fairy tale. Set in a faraway time — summer 2011 — when office flirtations were fun, ambition was a given and purses hung […]
Hur Jin-ho’s star-studded “The Assassin(s)” turns the holes in a public investigation into an imaginative mystery along the lines of Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” Like Stone’s provocative thriller, Hur crafts a clockwork political saga sure to spark curiosities about the attempted assassination of strongman South Korean prime minister Park Chung-hee in 1974, which resulted in the […]
Every surface period detail is present and correct to an eerie degree in “The Smell of Apples”: the gawkily short seasonal school uniforms, the ickily patterned kitchen tiles, the garden chairs like steel satellite dishes, the orange-and-brown daisy print that anyone of a certain age will recognize from sundry towels, mattresses and beach umbrellas. Production […]
Bahman Ghobadi directs some fascinating performances in “Trees Are Watching,” his horror movie based on the Kurdish legend of people being reborn as trees and living second lives as furniture. Not only does actress Eva Green make a meal out of some paper-thin concepts, but her co-stars include some of the finest child actors you’re […]
In Matt Barats’ “Anchors Aweigh,” a caustic alt-comedian is left adrift after his failed proposal, prompting him to revisit old footage from his college days and ruminate on his arrested development. It’s a lot less serious than it sounds, in part because Barats’ self-insert — who he also plays — has a sardonic cadence that […]
Eugene Kotlyarenko has built a career on drawing upon his widely-viewed cinephilic base of knowledge to consider more contemporary forms of hyper-online, of-the-moment provocation, and “Vintage Violence” is no exception. As with Kotlyarenko’s arguably best-known film, 2020’s “Spree,” live-streaming is key: “Vintage Violence” introduces obnoxious social media celebrity Carter (Cole Sprouse) mid-stream before quickly spinning […]
