Authors — Elissa Suh
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More Heart Than a Midnight Movie: Oscar Boyson and Ricky Camilleri on Our Hero, Balthazar
“It was important to us not to be a shit post,” says Ricky Camilleri, co-writer and co-producer of Our Hero, Balthazar, thanking me for not describing it as “edge-lordy.” On paper, the film, directed and co-written by Oscar Boyson, sounds like a provocation: a dark comedy about a teen who tries to stop a school shooting—not out of moral clarity, but out of ego. Balthazar Malone (Jaeden Martell) is a wealthy Manhattan private school kid living in a high-rise, performing sensitivity online through teary grief narratives—essentially crying for influence. In a bid to impress his school crush, a girl more […]
by Elissa Suh on Mar 26, 2026 -
“Trojan Horse Filmmaking”: Adam and Zack Khalil on Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]
In 1990, a federal law was passed requiring the return of Indigenous human remains and sacred items to their rightful communities. More than three decades later, most of those ancestors are still waiting—boxed, catalogued, and stored in museum basements and university archives. In Aanikoobijigan, filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil turn their attention to that unfinished work, following the long, often painful effort to bring ancestors home for proper burial. The film centers on a group of tribal specialists in Michigan who carry out this work day to day, navigating institutions built to hold on to what was never theirs. For […]
by Elissa Suh on Feb 5, 2026 -
“What Is a Golf Course but the Gentrification of Land?”: Rafael Manuel on Filipiñana
In Filipiñana, tension often lives inside the image itself: a desiccated pine tree creaks against a bright blue sky; mangos left to rot on the branch. There is beauty here, but also decay. Rafael Manuel’s debut feature expands on his 2020 Berlinale-winning short (which is streamable courtesy of The Criterion Channel) to offer an extended yet precise parable about class, memory, and quiet violence in his home country, the Philippines—filtered through the microcosm of a golf course on the outskirts of Manila during a scorching summer day. The film follows Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a new tee girl, as she acclimates […]
by Elissa Suh on Jan 26, 2026 -
“We Go from 16mm to Super 16 to 35mm”: Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera
Italian filmmaker Alice Rorhwacher’s puckish and scintillatingly tactile fourth feature is her most ambitious to date. Once again dramatizing the conflicting ideals of modernity and tradition, past and present, Rohrwacher continues to pay debt to forebears of Italian cinema like Ermanno Olmi while also infusing her film with a symbolic surrealism and neo-realist class consciousness reminiscent of the respective likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini Roberto Rossellini. La Chimera follows English archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor), who possesses a mystical ability to divine the location of subterranean treasures. Freshly released from prison, he reunites with a band of tombaroli (essentially grave robbers) […]
by Elissa Suh on Mar 27, 2024 -
“I Have Never Seen Any Restaurant Movies”: Frederick Wiseman on Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Haute cuisine as a form of artistic creation—one both time-intensive in its preparation and ephemeral in its shelf-life—and how to keep such a tradition alive is at the center of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros. Whittled down from 150 hours of footage, the four-hour documentary takes on a leisurely pace matching both the unhurried unfolding of the dining experience at the titular restaurant and the elaborate process of crafting a meal. Beyond showing us the preparation of the food and every conceivable method of cookery, Wiseman brings us the source of it, too, following the Troisgois chefs as they visit […]
by Elissa Suh on Nov 22, 2023 -
“Luma Was a Feisty Cow”: Andrea Arnold on Cow
“We call them dumb animals, and they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” – Anna Sewell, 1877 Andrea Arnold, director of Fish Tank and American Honey, chronicles the travails of dairy cows in her first documentary feature. Upon giving birth—shown in viscous detail in the film’s opening scene—Luma and her calf are immediately separated. For 98 minutes, the camera, low to the ground, scuttles closely after them, as they’re herded from pen to pen, fed, milked, dehorned and even bred to establish the intimate, diurnal rhythm […]
by Elissa Suh on Apr 7, 2022
