Using an Unreal Game Engine to bold and unsettling effect, Ishan Shukla’s Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust is a truly unique and strange sci-fi vision.
Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust Won’t Be a Hit. It’s Too Unique For That.
Festivals
Reviews and dispatches exploring the best new cinema premiering around the world.
Small Hours of the Night Gives Testimony to Disembodied Dissidence
Daniel Hui’s chamber piece makes the most of its limited location to provide fascinating ruminations on the reverberations of Singaporean history.
Godsterminal Remains as Empty as a Reenactment
The concluding chapter of Georg Tiller’s Gotland trilogy, Godsterminal struggles to escape from the legacy of Ingmar Bergman’s seminal works.
Eternal in Name. Eternal in Nature.
Science-fiction romance Eternal is pretty good for the first twenty minutes. Then it repeats the same point over and over again, to diminishing results.
The Timely Desire Lines Gives the Forgotten Home and Liberation From Anxiety
Academic-turned-filmmaker Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines is a personal, politically-relevant time-travelling journey through the lives of trans men.
Radical Archeology Challenges Past and Present in Praia Formosa
Brazilian documentarian Julia De Simone’s first fiction feature imbues the past with the urgency of the present, breaking free of historical restraints.
Best Festival Films and Hidden Festival Gems 2023
Avoiding consensus for our top 2023 picks, Journey Into Cinema focuses on both the best festival films and the finest hidden gems.
IDFA 2023: Fact, Fiction, Fabrication
As IDFA as an institution failed to find the correct response to pro-Palestinian activism, the films themselves had an equally knotty relationship to facts.
Kennedy Takes Us On a Deadly Cinematic Rollercoaster
Anurag Kashyap returns with another blood-splattered revenge thriller, re-affirming the auteur as one of the most vital voices in Indian cinema.
The Enduring Appeal of Bugis Street
A new restoration of Bugis Street underscores the queer and transgressive Singaporean film’s timeless message nearly 30 years after its release.