“My grandmother once told me in Navajo storytelling, symbols mean more than facts. And time means nothing at all.” What follows this declaration in Billy Luther’s narrative debut Frybread Face and Me inches the film away from that promise of experimentation towards a straight-forward coming-of-age story; still, the tension between Luther’s experience as a documentary filmmaker and the fictional story of a Navajo pre-teen’s summer spent on the Rez generates at least the potential for an alternative narratological approach.

The third feature film by Filipino experimentalist Miko Revereza may be his most conventional work to date. But as one settles into Nowhere Near it becomes evident that this is by design. Where many of his previous films have addressed the almost hour-by-hour challenges faced by undocumented immigrants, here Revereza casts a somewhat wider net.

Despite the changes that Cahiers du Cinéma has undergone over the years, its legacy still carries some critical authority—enough, at least, that its apparent endorsement of Weston Razooli’s debut feature, Riddle of Fire, which graced the cover of its Cannes issue back in May, was enough to convince me to see the film.

Eager to celebrate a theatrical box-office win, Variety recently praised the success of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s equally moving and galling Everything Everywhere All at Once, chirping that its broad appeal beyond arthouse crowds attests not only to adult audiences’ willingness to return to theatres for the right sort of movie, but also to the fact that “ticket buyers really love the concept of a multiverse.”

Entering Riz Ahmed in the disability cosplay sweepstakes as a young drummer coping with hearing loss, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal originated as a lightly meta vehicle for husband-and-wife sludge-metal duo Jucifer to be directed by Derek Cianfrance, with whom Marder co-wrote The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). That the final result is more surprising than the rote uplift narrative suggested by its edifying logline is a testament to both Ahmed’s cagey intensity...

In 1977, Philip K. Dick gave a speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” in which he revealed that many of his dystopian novels weren’t the products of his imagination or dreams, but came from recovered memories of actual alternate worlds. Dick was entirely sincere, and this realization plagued him. Footage of this speech (and of Dick’s skeptical French audience) punctuate Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, which explores the psychological and cultural impacts of that moment when science fiction seeps into our reality.

By Adam Nayman In a 2007 interview with Filmmaker magazine, Craig Zobel opined that “there’s something sexy and cool about being a scam artist…it just never fully lets you empathize with the person on the other side of it.” He was referring to the fact that his debut feature Great World of Sound (2007) included…

By John Semley Kubrick has his monolith, Lynch his voyeur peering through the closet door, Spielberg his countless shots of faces wide-eyed and slack-jawed, awash in the wonder of some off-screen astonishment, all images that singularly apprehend broad authorial sensibilities. It’s been hard to narrow in on any one characteristic image that defines the cinema…