Ioncinema

No Country for Smart Men: Aster Satirizes the Obvious It would seem all is actually for naught in Eddington, Ari Aster’s sprawling, meandering fourth and least inspired feature to date. While previously a forerunner of the elevated horror era, Aster...

The Lost Daughter: Herzi Passes Up Potency in Standard Adaptation “My name is Fatima,” is one of the constant refrains utilized in Fatima Daas’ celebrated first novel The Last One (2020), a fragmented piece of auto-fiction which parallels the author’s...

Burn Witch, Burn: Kowalski Nurses a Curse in Sinister Backwoods For her sophomore feature Her Will Be Done (Que ma volonté soit faite), Julia Kowalski channels Stephen King’s Carrie, bringing to mind the infamous crescendo, “And then the world exploded.”...

Belle de Jour: Mourning Becomes Sex Work in Poukine’s Debut There’s arguably a slippery slope at work in Alexe Poukine’s narrative debut Kika, a far cry from the zany dark comedy constituting the similarly named titular figure of Almodovar’s 1993...

When he was selected for the prestigious competition section this past April, Paris-born Spanish  of Galician background filmmaker Óliver Laxe achieved a remarkable feat of having all four of his films in all sections of Cannes. His first three films...

Known for a filmography heavy into psychological thriller portraits with noir and crime element trimmings, the French-German filmmaker saw his second and third features films land in the Palme d’Or competition back with With a Friend Like Harry… (2000) and...

A Bridge Too Far: Laxe Enters the Zone “The Zone wants to be respected. Otherwise it will punish.” Aleksandr Kayadonvsky’s line from Tarkovsky’s existential sci-fi classic Stalker (1979) comes to mind when viewing Sirat, the fourth and arguably most accessible...

Investigation of Citizens Above Suspicion: Moll Persists with Police Procedural Dominik Moll reunites with his usual collaborating scribe Gilles Marchand in Dossier 137, their third genre oriented title in a row following Only the Animals (2019) and their runaway hit...

Snow Way: Hémon Delivers Unwanted Help in the High Alps A young, idealistic school teacher almost literally chooses her hill to die on in Louise Hémon’s feature debut L’Engloutie (The Girl in the Snow), a slow-burning battle of wills between...

Ordeal by Innocence: Loznitsa Mines the Terrors of Naïveté A good man is hard to find, and if one were to be found, he’s likely wet behind the ears. So begins a retrospective parable in Two Prosecutors, the first narrative...