Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial SF project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger.  Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) belongs to a family whose business is selling their ground-fishing catch off the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) all rely on the 17-year-old high school student to help negotiate the daily pricing of their catch so that the family isn’t taken advantage of by local cheapskate buyers. Ruby takes it upon herself to look after and stoically stand up for her family, and she does this, at least in part, because of her identity as a child of deaf adults (CODA). As […]

Matías Piñeiro’s sixth feature and seventh Shakespeare-related film, Isabella, begins with purely abstract images whose use here is new in his work: four different shades on the blue spectrum, alternately lighter and darker in smaller and smaller concentric rectangles. The smallest, central rectangle fades to purple before three different shades of that color pulsate outward to the largest rectangle. The rectangles then dissolve into one unified purple that fills the rectangular frame containing the film itself, which starts gently pulsating in different shades under silent opening titles.  These abstract color studies (whose resemblance to the work of James Turrell was […]

Port Authority, filmmaker Danielle Lessovitz’s gritty debut feature, is “so New York” that one of its least surprising traits is that Martin Scorsese is credited as executive producer. Opening in the cold, shadow-filled halls of the metro transportation hub that provides the film its title, the narrative follows Paul (Fionn Whitehead), a twentysomething arriving in from Pittsburgh, as he attempts to get in touch with his estranged sister (Louisa Krause). A bloody altercation on the subway leads to a chance encounter that connects Paul to a few (temporary) friends, odd jobs, and shelters to live in.  One evening, Paul meets […]

When I got on Zoom with Christian Petzold, the writer-director had already been doing press off and on for Undine for 16 months. The film premiered at last year’s Berlinale to mixed-muted response and only now, via IFC Films, is seeing US release (both in theaters and on PVOD). In the interim, Petzold got and recovered from COVID-19 while doing interviews as the film continued its (virtual) festival run. There may not seem to be much left to talk about at this point, but Petzold is a famously inexhaustible and self-analyzing interview. In the middle of our talk, his internet cut […]

At the Berlin International Film Festival in 2014, the German-born Anja Marquardt’s debut feature, She’s Lost Control, premiered to positive notices and went on to a healthy festival life. A fictional account of a graduate student (Brooke Bloom) doubling as a professional sex surrogate for men struggling with physical intimacy, the film represented a unique new voice on the independent film scene, ultimately netting Marquardt Film Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay.  Several years removed from that film’s theatrical run, Marquardt has now taken on a project with similar themes but a much more […]

“Under conditions of terror most people will comply,” Hannah Arendt wrote from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “but some will not.” This simple, almost simplistic sentiment permeates There Is No Evil, the new film from dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. The original Farsi title, Sheytan vojud nadarad, translates more directly to The Devil Doesn’t Exist, a phrase that may sound hopeful until you unpack its dark implications. Rasoulof is among that rarified latter group that does not comply. He has continued to live and make films in Iran despite severe restrictions and regular threats of imprisonment. Rather than retreat into […]

Writer-director Eugene Ashe was a successful musician before he started making films, a background evident in every exquisite frame of Sylvie’s Love. Not just because male lead Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) is a saxophonist and the movie features the best jazz soundtrack since ’Round Midnight, and not just because female lead Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) begins the film working in her dad’s record store and has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and knows how to tailor recommendations to each customer. The musical influence goes beyond these considerations to inform every texture and detail of Ashe’s late ’50s-early ’60s set drama, a gloriously […]

Despite the grim promise of its title, Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers is more emotionally brutal than it is violent. Set in a Utah town so small that everyone knows everyone, the film follows David (Clayne Crawford), a depressed everyman who has recently separated from his wife and the mother of his children, Nikki (Sepideh Moafi). Well-intentioned though it may be, their agreement to spend time apart and potentially date other people sends David into a downward spiral, and once he’s made aware of his wife’s new male friend, Derek (Chris Coy), things grow more complicated and conclude […]