Ioncinema

Darkness Visible: Khrzhanovsky Reformulates Saga of Shattered Scientists If ex-Attorney General and fascist sentinel Pam Bondi was ever credited as uttering anything worth repeating, it was her childish ‘emperor’s new clothes’ technique testifying before congress in her doltish redirect from...

Let the White One In: Affleck Can’t Satisfy the Hunger Like many actors who doggedly pursue a parallel career as film directors, Casey Affleck manages to present interesting ideas without really sensing the best way to execute them. Such is...

Atlas Dug: Zeller Teases the Comedy of Obligation It’s become increasingly clear celebrated writer Florian Zeller has a difficult time killing his darlings when it comes to adapting his own plays, perhaps nowhere more evident in his third feature, Bunker,...

Among the directorial debuts loading up this year’s Discovery programme at this year’s Toronto Intl. Film Festival we find the boldly titled Head to Head by Iranian filmmaker Ghasideh Golmakani. Born in Tehran, Golmakani’s work to date has looked at...

The Devil is a Woman: Strippoli Concocts an Elegant Parent Trap As far as horrific moral fables about Catholic guilt and resisting temptation go, director Paolo Strippoli unleashes a doozy with his fourth feature, The Spiral. Had an inventive producer...

Broken Heart Art: Kore-eda Builds Bittersweet Elegy to Friendship Art is both the impetus for destruction and creation in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, Look Back, a live-action adaptation of the 2024 animated film of the same title (based on the manga...

Magnificent Obsession: Di Marco & Picoli Patrol the Poison of Perfection Our conditioned notions regarding beauty standards maintains our insidious and unhealthy fixation with obtaining (or maintaining) those attributes which remain most culturally celebrated. Despite ameliorative messaging wielded as a...

The Blindness of Strangers: Dorabialski Stings the Storyteller “In the end, we’ll all become stories,” per Margaret Atwood, a sentiment which is ultimately at the metatextual heart of Agata the Writer, the sophomore narrative feature from Kuba Dorabialski. Born in...

The Penile Code: el-Toukhy Explores the Gendered Paradox of Liberation Something is certainly rotten in the state of Denmark following the country’s liberation from Nazi occupation in May el-Touky’s third feature Woman Unknown, a bleak, dismal portrait of women determined...

An Affair to Disremember: Pallaoro Explores the Unbearable Bleakness of Being Love is hardly a many-splendored thing in The Echo Chamber, the fourth feature directed by Andrea Palloro (and his first from a screenplay not originally conceived by himself). Based...