Ioncinema

Last September, we were thrilled to share a small yet significant piece of news: Jasmila Žbanić was preparing a sequel to her acclaimed film in 2020’s Quo Vadis, Aida? (read our ★★★★ star review), which was selected at the Venice...

After winning the Silver Lion for Best Director with Miss Violence (2013), Greek filmmaker Alexandros Avranas returns to the Lido in the Orizzonti section with his latest work. This time, the focus is on a Russian family exiled to Sweden,...

Swedish filmmaker Mika Gustafson shifts from the docu world beginnings to her fiction feature debut in Paradise is Burning – a selection in the 2023 Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. Winner of the Best Director award, Gustafson infuses her world...

The 2024 film festival summer closed out with the prizing at the Locarno Film Festival and it’s the debut feature of a Lithuanian filmmaker who claimed to highest prize in the Golden Leopard aka the Pardo d’Oro. Our Nicholas Bell...

Right Sketch, Wrong Skit: Sangsoo Scans Patterns in Bittersweet Interludes Perspectives of regret and the uncertain odyssey of retrospection emphasize the undertones of perennial auteur Hong Sangsoo’s latest, By the Stream (his second premiere of the year following A Traveler’s...

Imitation of Life: Giordana Composes an Old-Fashioned Miracle Music seems to be the language of the heart in The Life Apart (La vita accanto), a bizarre tale of suffering and expiation relayed with sedate repose by director Marco Tullio Giordana. Having...

Through a Glass Darkly: Keltek Finds Divinity Through Insanity Sanism might be the term best used to define the trials and travails faced by the protagonist of Turkish director Gürcan Keltek‘s sophomore film New Dawn Fades (Yeni șafak solarken). Like...

The Taste of a Poison Paradise: Bliuvaite Explores the Commodification of Women’s Bodies Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė perhaps could not have contrived a more succinct title than Toxic (Akiplėša) for her debut feature, set in the bleak confines of an...

The Unhappy Hooker: Vernier Explores Ennui in Monaco Interconnected drifters aligned with sex work once again provide the backbone for Virgil Vernier’s third feature 100,000,000,000,000 (aka Cent mille milliards), a reference to the futile amount of money required to buy...

The Dead Don’t Die: Slim Sets Adrift in Tedious Metaphors For his third feature film, Agora, Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim continues in the realm of allegory, this time infusing elements which suggest arthouse genre. However, the initial enigmatic intrigue...