Ioncinema

Corporate Cannibals: Blondé Underwhelms with Ethical Reckoning There’s an interesting idea behind Dust, which finds two Belgian entrepreneurs essentially navigating their last two days of freedom in 1999 and struggling to come to terms with embracing accountability for their actions....

A Self-Made Man: Schleinzer Explores the Privilege of Pants If there’s a trough line (beyond the eponymous titles) of Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s films, it’s a connective theme of humans who try to restore equanimity in their personal lives by...

Hysterical Intervention: Alper Gets Overwrought Exploring Tribalism The land dispute at the center of Emin Alper’s latest film Salvation has all the trademarks of a Shakespearean tragedy, so it’s unfortunate his approach often feels labored, and at times, over the...

The Killing of a Sacred Dogtooth: Ainouz Paints with Contempt Karim Aïnouz doesn’t so much eat the rich as he does regurgitate them in his latest feature, Rosebush Pruning, a hyper stylized rehash of Marco Bellocchio’s breakout classic, Fists in...

Every edition, the Doha Film Institute lands some bold global filmmaker folk to offer mentorship and masterclasses for the next generation of filmmakers and this year’s Qumra have selected the likes of Alice Diop, who gave us the masterwork Saint...

Only Mothers Left Alive: Bergholm Tackles Motherhood Malaise Finnish director Hanna Bergholm adds to the subgenre of motherhood body horror with Nightborn (Yön Lapsi), an arguably more contained palette than her 2022 debut Hatching, which similarly dealt with female body image...

Family Rituals: Gomis Goes For Broke in Sprawling Epic With his first narrative feature in nearly a decade, French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis formulates a complex tapestry with Dao, which is defined as “a perpetual and circular movement which flows in...

A Jazzman’s Blues: Gee Strikes the Right Chords in Tender DocudramaE British filmmaker Grant Gee, heretofore best known as a documentarian of various musical artists, such as the band Radiohead and Joy Division, turns in a stellar narrative feature with...

How to Beat the High Cost of Fascism: Çatak Flounders in Blaring Treatise Following his Academy Award nominated The Teacher’s Lounge (2023), Turkish-German director Ilker Çatak conjures a more overt political exercise in Yellow Letters (Gelbe Briefe). Set in Ankara and...

A Death in the Family: Bouzid Explores the Tolls of Open Secrets What’s most expertly encapsulated in Tunisian filmmaker Leyla Bouzid’s third feature In a Whisper (À voix basse) is the quiet cruelty of the closet, the apparently immortal mechanism...