Whether you’re in Lithuania, Brazil or Benin, we all have someplace we’d rather be. Live from Golden Apricot International Film Festival.
GAIFF Day Two: You Can’t Leave, Stay or Return
Category: Festivals
Reviews and dispatches exploring the best new cinema premiering around the world.
GAIFF Day One: Ararat to the West, Karabakh to the East
The story of Armenia’s complicated suffering is laid bare in two stylistically opposite yet thematically linked films. From Golden Apricot Film Festival.
Distant Voices, Windless Lives
With a tight 1:1 ratio and an eye for arresting visuals, Windless sure looks great, but its grief-laden tale fails to hit with the viewer emotionally.
No One is Watching in the Panopticon
A study of a young confused man that examines the changing mores of Georgian society, Panopticon fails to stimulate the brain or the heart.
The Fate of Life Under the Grey Sky
With a stripped-back aesthetic, Mara Tamkovich’s debut Under the Grey Sky carefully surveys the cost of practicing independent journalism in modern-day Belarus.
Plastic Guns. A Perfect Shitpost.
Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Plastic Guns doubles down on the provocations of Bloody Oranges in an off-kilter, hilarious and deeply nasty farce.
Baby Works His Way Out of a Corner
Marcelo Caetano’s Baby might combine reliable and clichéd tropes, but Caetano’s sex work study succeeds thanks to its keen observation of queer communities.
Sean Baker Does It Again with Anora
Sean Baker continues his deeply humanist exploration of sex workers’ complex inner lives with the touching and charming Russian-American fairytale Anora.
Oh No, Canada
Paul Schrader’s latest Oh Canada is a self-reflexive work that fails to combine its various threads into a satisfying treatise on life’s regrets.
The Substance Has Never Met a Real Woman
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance boasts impressive technical sound design and monster work but suffers from a lack of compelling female characters.