By Saffron Maeve An inopportune time to make a film about a lesbian conductor in a private relationship with her cellist gearing up to conduct Mahler, maybe, but Chloé Robichaud’s Days of Happiness is most invested in the tussle for control between a young woman and her overbearing father. A gifted, personable conductor and pianist,…

By Saffron Maeve In his follow-up to the delightfully odious Sick of Myself (2022), Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli—alongside executive producer Ari Aster—conceives a cyclonic psychodrama in which evolutionary biologist and university professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage, hiding in his beard) attains overnight fame after appearing in everyone’s dreams. In these dreams, he is comically apathetic—buildings…

By Saffron Maeve Making onscreen BDSM appear tedious and pedestrian is a great bit, not only because it seems to encapsulate the sexual incongruity of New Yorkers within a particular age bracket, but because it desaturates the very act of sex; it’s as if we’re watching a faucet drip or a mattress inflate. As with…

By Saffron Maeve Luke Gilford’s pastoral re-spin manifested first through his own history with the International Gay Rodeo Association (queering Americana since 1985), then as a photo series, art exhibition, pictorial, and now a feature film, helmed by the photographer himself. Dylan (Charlie Plummer) is a 21-year-old construction worker supporting his unaffectionate, alcoholic single mother…

By Saffron Maeve [Email to editor upon submission of capsule; “why is every movie TÁR?????”]  It now seems a cinematic truth that conducting Mahler’s 5th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic consigns one to existential fracture or total erosion. Nina (Maren Eggert), the accomplished protag of Hanna Slak’s Not A Word, is in the middle of…

By Saffron Maeve Pulled from the pages of Kim Thúy’s award-winning novel of short reflections on family, refuge, and identity, Charles-Olivier Michaud’s Ru surveys an affluent Vietnamese family escaping to Quebec on the heels of the Fall of Saigon. Ru is mostly observed through the eyes of the family’s young daughter Nguyen An Tinh (Chloé…

By Saffron Maeve In which Pedro Almodóvar vows to suspend anachronisms and remain faithful to the genre of the Western: Strange Way of Life, the director’s latest 30-minute short sees two former lovers, Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva (Pedro Pascal), reuniting after 25 years, just as a murder is being pieced together in town. Due…

The object impermanence of Saim Sadiq’s Pakistani drama Joyland (2022)—the story of a married young man in Lahore who falls for a trans dancer after taking up work at an erotic theatre—has a number of moving parts: the film premieres at the 75th Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section (the first Pakistani film to do so), where it scoops up the Jury Prize and also is awarded the Queer Palm; Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting blocks the theatrical release, citing “highly objectionable material,” and “glamourising of transgender love affairs”

There are few sights more imprinting than Alexander Skarsgård, nearly nude and with a silicone cap and cheek retractor, pouring himself feet-first into polychromatic sludge. He’s almost unrecognizable in his starkness, eyeballs positively juddering with fear as the room fills with liquid, all so he can elude capital punishment. As with fidelity and morals, the legalities within Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool are elastic.

we don’t see anyone die in The Maiden, a ghost story wherein the dead are less gone than misplaced (even a lifeless cat appears to survive the cosmic wash cycle). While one may occasionally take issue with the film’s determinedly elliptical approach to its central subject, Foy always remains both formally and narratively fastened to the amorphous, ugly, and insoluble reality of grief.

By Saffron Maeve A pejorative superficially on par with its sister terms Big Pharma and Big Tech, which imply a gadgety reshaping of the natural world, Big Ag looms heavy over the sunny fields of Carla Simón’s acclaimed Alcarràs, which was awarded the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale and exceeded all box-office expectations upon…

By Saffron Maeve Given the absurd, moralistic onslaught which obscured Maïmouna Doucouré’s 2020 debut Cuties, one might wonder how a first-time filmmaker bounces back from such controversy, or from a letter addressed to the DOJ by champion of the cinematic cause Ted Cruz. Gracefully, it seems, as Doucouré’s sophomore effort Hawa is a trim, affecting…

By Saffron Maeve  Much like the maggot-licked suckling pig shrivelling on the front porch in Ti West’s prequel to this year’s porno-slasher X, Pearl is an increasingly meatless and eye-grabbing article, comprising the kind of prepensed exposition that could only follow a desperately self-ciphering film. Set 61 years prior to the events of X, backdropped…

By Saffron Maeve  You’ve already met Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen), the tenacious Kubrick-truther with zero EQ and lofty dreams of the Tisch School Of The Arts. He’s no far cry from the goading basement dwellers colloquially termed “film bros,” a brand of arrested young men who love movies to the point of exhaustion; the sort…

By Saffron Maeve “Soil does not come to life of its own accord.” So says Rita Ferrando in Ikebana (2021), a poetic documentary short about ecological temporality and the Japanese art of floral arrangement, which screened at IFFR earlier this year. The sediment is instead churned into existence by decomposing trees and heaps of fallen…