Ioncinema

Judgment in Stone: Kossakovsky Gazes Into the Concrete Jungle Celebrated documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky explores our complex relationship with concrete in the abstract visual feast, Architecton. For those familiar with his previous explorations, such as 2020’s Gunda, in which we follow...

The Traveler Has Come: Huppert Shines in Latest Collaboration with Sang-soo There are few directors who seem to rightly channel the comic side of Isabelle Huppert’s unique strangeness than the perennial Hong Sang-soo. Having worked together on the lovely In...

Following a filmography comprising approximately eight short films just over a decade-span, with the most recent being the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival premiere “Salam,” along with television series work, British and U.S. based filmmaker Claire Fowler embarked on a project...

A Walk in the Clouds: Becerra Mines Escapism and Innocence in Quiet Drama A dwindling group of alpaca herders find themselves on the verge of violent displacement in Franco Garcia Becerra’s sophomore film Through the Rocks and Clouds. In essence,...

Your Friends & Neighbors: Téchiné Tries for Ethical Sentiments Now in his eighties, director André Téchiné continues his steady, perennial output with the humanist melodrama My New Friends. Though its English language feels a bit trite, the original French language...

Family Matters: Glasner’s Sprawling Portrait of Chaotic Dysfunction Exemplifying Tolstoy’s famous Anna Karenina quote on ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ German filmmaker Matthias Glasner makes his first narrative feature in over a decade with the cryptically...

Mistress of Misery: Yang Explores the Turmoil of Transformation Here comes the rain again, falling on her head like a tragedy. Or so is the somewhat gloomy sentiment of Qiu Yang’s debut Some Rain Must Fall, which finds Cai, 45-year-old...

Plunder Years: Diop Reflects on the Complex Realities of Reparation The spirit of Ozymandias, the classic poem from Percy Bysshe Shelley, might rouse itself in one’s mind during Mati Diop’s short but passionate documentary Dahomey – “Look on my Works,...

In the Cannes Best Director-winning, The Taste of Things (aka The Pot-au-Feu) the passage of time is measured in teaspoons, tablespoons and table manners. Three decades after his playful exploration of the senses in The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran...

Caste of the Unjust: DuVernay’s Scholarly Drama Traces the Universal Social Ills of Hierarchy For her fifth narrative feature, Origin, Ava DuVernay takes an inventive approach to adapting Pulitzer Prize Winner Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction publication Caste: The Origins of...