Authors — Jordan Cronk
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Uniting Home and the World: A Report From the 2025 Play-Doc International Film Festival
Each year, the Play-Doc International Film Festival brings a modest but well-curated selection of classic and contemporary films to Tui, Galicia, a historic border town that sits on the banks of the Miño River separating Spain and Portugal. As its name implies, Play-Doc is ostensibly dedicated to nonfiction cinema, though like other festivals with a similar remit (True/False, Visions du Réel, etc), it takes a liberal approach to what constitutes a documentary. The festival’s 21st edition, which ran from May 7 to 11, went further in this regard than ever before. Alongside two competitive programs, one for new and recent international […]
by Jordan Cronk on Jun 18, 2025 -
“I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia
In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]
by Jordan Cronk on Sep 25, 2024 -
“America is Desperate for a Narrative”: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on Invention
Following a decade of work in experimental and documentary cinema, director Courtney Stephens steps into fiction for the first time with Invention, a remarkably resourceful microbudget drama that nonetheless resists strict categorization. Starring and co-conceived by Callie Hernandez, the film draws upon the actress’s real-life relationship with her late father, a medical doctor turned small-time huckster who made a name for himself on local television talk shows and public access programs in the ’90s and 2000s. In this fictionalized telling set in the Berkshires, VHS footage of those TV appearances weave through a story in which Hernandez, playing a version […]
by Jordan Cronk on Aug 15, 2024 -
“We Were Together 24 Hours a Day for Six Weeks”: Bill and Turner Ross on Gasoline Rainbow
Gasoline Rainbow, the seventh feature by Bill and Turner Ross, marks a return to a world of young people familiar from the brothers’s early efforts 45365 (2009) and Tchoupitoulas (2012), which centered, respectively, on residents of Sydney, Ohio and New Orleans, Louisiana. Like those formative works, the duo’s latest is uniquely attuned to adolescent emotions and the rhythms of small town America—except with a broadened perspective and formal command afforded by 15 years of working in a variety of modes and milieus. The film follows five high schoolers from the fictional town of Wiley, Oregon who take to the open […]
by Jordan Cronk on May 8, 2024 -
Masterclasses at Qumra 2024 by Leos Carax, Claire Denis and More
Launched ten years ago by the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an industry convention held annually in Qatar’s capital city of Doha. Through panels, workshops, screenings and masterclasses, Qumra brings together a cross-section of producers, festival programmers and journalists in an effort, according to organizers, to “provide mentorship, nurturing, and hands-on development for filmmakers from Qatar and around the world.” This year’s edition, which ran from March 1 to 6, arrived at a particularly fraught moment for the Middle East with Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. After cancelling last November’s Ajyal Film Festival in solidarity with Palestine, the DFI, which […]
by Jordan Cronk on Mar 15, 2024 -
Revisiting Silk Stalkings: Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn on IFFR 2024 Premiere Dream Team
Dream Team, the third feature by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, is another in the writer-director duo’s run of genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables. Here, the influence of ’90s basic cable TV thrillers is channeled into an episodic story about a pair of Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) who travel to Mexico to investigate the mysterious death of a corral smuggler. Shot by Horn in characteristically textured 16mm, the film unfolds between a variety of West Coast locales stretching from Baja California to Vancouver. As the body count rises and rumors of a physic coral […]
by Jordan Cronk on Feb 9, 2024 -
Cannes 2023: Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton on The Sweet East
Originally published during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, our interview with Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton about their recommended feature, The Sweet East, is being reposted today as the film is in theatrical release from Utopia. America’s fraught political present meets the less savory corners of cinema’s past in The Sweet East, the first feature directed by celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Penned with typically acerbic wit by film critic Nick Pinkerton, The Sweet East stars Talia Ryder in a should-be-star-making performance as Lilian, a high school senior who impulsively runs off while on a class trip to Washington, […]
by Jordan Cronk on Dec 1, 2023 -
Crafting a Life as a Filmmaker: Ashley McKenzie on Queens of the Qing Dynasty
Queens of the Qing Dynasty, the second feature from Nova Scotia’s Ashley McKenzie, is a unique work of independently produced Canadian cinema. Both a stark about-face from the hardscrabble realism of her 2016 debut Werewolf—about a pair of strung-out young lovers living hand-to-mouth on the margins of Cape Breton—and a decisive break from the docufiction trends of art cinema at large, Queens is rigorously composed and austerely dramatized, an artful fable pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Starring newcomer Sarah Walker as Star, a neurodivergent teen who develops a deep connection with her caregiver An (Ziyin Zheng, also making their […]
by Jordan Cronk on Sep 30, 2022 -
Between Tourneur and Buñuel: Serge Bozon on Don Juan
Five years after upending the gender dynamics of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Isabelle Huppert-starring Mrs. Hyde, French director Serge Bozon has returned with a modern spin on the legend of Don Juan. Like his early features Mods (2002) and La France (2007), Bozon’s Don Juan is a musical of sorts: characters often break into song—not in joyous expressions of amour fou, but rather in pained soliloquies of regret and heartbreak. Starring Tahar Rahim and Virginie Efira, the film opens with Efira’s Julie no-showing at the couple’s wedding, an act of self-possession that leaves Rahim’s coquettish Laurent, a […]
by Jordan Cronk on Jun 9, 2022 -
“They’re Problematic, and That’s Not a Problem”: Mondo Films at True/False’s Neither/Nor
Throughout this year’s Neither/Neither program at the 13th annual True/False Film Festival, I found myself frequently calling to mind storied Los Angeles film curator John Fles’ concept of “analytic programming.” Far less pedantic than the label suggests, Fles’ directive calls, quite simply, for the curatorial consideration of films with “subjects usually tabooed” — works of artistic merit that, when investigated at all, are generally “dealt with a kind of academic-aesthetic paternalism which robs these often wild films of their real content: as blasters of the traditional mores.” To say that this year’s Neither/Nor titles blasted traditional mores would be an understatement. The four […]
by Jordan Cronk on Mar 23, 2016
