Ioncinema

The Cranes Aren’t Flying: Zvyagintsev Unleashes Primordial Tendencies “They always end disastrously,” Kate Burton advises Diane Lane of extramarital affairs in Adrian Lyne’s 2002 erotic thriller Unfaithful, a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 classic An Unfaithful Wife. It ends up...

We nearly lost this master filmmaker during the Covid pandemic and so Minotaur counts as Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first oeuvre after being hospitalized for a year and his debut work outside his homeland. His feature debut The Return (2003) won the...

What Have They Done to Your Daughters?: Refn Returns with Vacuous Vengeance After disappearing into television for the past decade, Nicolas Winding Refn once again rears into the cinema with Her Private Hell, which unfortunately is an insufferable, nonsensical exercise...

Uncanny Valley: Mungiu Explores Liberated Prisons Totalitarian mentality is driven to logical extremes in Fjord, Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s first foray outside of his native country, named for the deep, underwater valleys formed by glaciers common to the geography of...

Years We Fell Apart: Razo Resurrects the Final Throes of Childhood For his first narrative feature, documentary filmmaker Bruno Santamaría Razo utilizes a docu-hybrid in Six Months in a Pink and Blue Building, an enigmatic title grasping at the wisps...

The Romanian master filmmaker Cristian Mungiu moves away from a backdrop he knows far too well to explore the family unit way further up north. Winner of the Palme d’Or in 2007 for his sophomore feature 4 Months, 3 Weeks...

She Who Is Not: Harari Explores Existential Identity Issues in the Body Swap “A woman, for me, must remain a woman,” stated Andrey Tarkovsky when once asked what he thought about women, proposing their innate femininity and weakness as their...

French director Arthur Harari might be best known as the co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall, but prior to that he saw 2013’s Peine perdue land at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week and his 2021’s Onoda: 10,000 Nights in...

Monster Squad: Hong-jin Goes Full-Blown Extraterrestrial For his fourth feature, South Korean director Na Hong-jin goes for breakneck, relentless mayhem in the curiously titled Hope. Always tending to blend genre elements in his previous efforts, Hong-jin has increasingly leaned into...

Fruit on the Vine: Marrakchi Harvests Bitter Justice “We give our bodies. All that for peanuts,” is an anguished remonstrance from the protagonist in Strawberries, the first feature film from Moroccan filmmaker Laïla Marrakchi in over a decade. A story...