Hammer to Nail

The Museum of Moving Image’s First Look Festival returns for its 12th edition. Showcasing some of this year’s exciting new voices in American and international cinema, this year’s edition will introduce New York audiences to eclectic, innovative works from around...

Writer-director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) explores desire and mercy in his newest queer noir, Misericordia. Translating to Mercy, the film follows Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) who returns to his Saint-Martial home for his late boss’s funeral. He soon becomes...

Films can often be described as “poetic.” Dialogue can be prose-like, editing can be lyrical, but very few films are narrated as an actual original poem, or organized in stanzas like Emmy-nominated documentarian Catherine Gund’s latest “docu-poem,” Meanwhile. Gund catches...

Filmmaker Mathijs Poppe first stepped foot in the Shatia refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon 13 years ago as a volunteer at a youth center in the camp. Upon the first interactions he had with those in the camp, he was...

(Check out Chris Reed’s Seven Veils movie review. The film is playing now in theaters via Elevation Pictures. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.) The work of Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (Guest of Honour) is often complex...

Though we will for once not have boots on the ground for SXSW 2025, that doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about the festival in this 31st iteration of its Film & TV conference, which runs March 7-15. As always, SXSW...

Two Women, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, marks the latest feature from acclaimed Quebec filmmaker Chloé Robichaud (Sarah Prefers to Run, Boundaries). The French-language comedy, adapted from Catherine Léger’s stage play, inspired by the 1970s films of...

(We here at Hammer to Nail are all about true independent cinema. But we also have to tip our hat to the great films of yesteryear that continue to inspire filmmakers and cinephiles alike. This week, “The Curbside Criterion” continues...

New Directors/New Films is coming back for its 54th edition. Since 1972, it has showcased work from the likes of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kelly Reichardt, Pedro Almodóvar, Souleymane Cissé, Jia Zhangke, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, Michael Haneke, Wong Kar-wai,...

Argentinian director Laura Casabé (The Returned) premiered her latest feature, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (where I reviewed it). Based on two short stories—“Our Lady of the Quarry” and “The Cart”—by author Mariana...