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”

The city of Phoenix has a legacy of unfulfilled aspirations and things that never quite were. From the legend of the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, to the Suns’ countless playoff eliminations, or even Barry Goldwater and John McCain’s respective failed runs for the presidency, the Arizona capital is emblematic of always being—and staying— just on the cusp of greatness. Despite being the fifth largest city in the US, it’s an amorphous locale within the iconography of the nation’s metropolises. It’s seen as a place in the sun where Canadian snowbirds go to thaw out, where Californians come to retire, and the last major stop before the long stretch of Sonoran Desert in all directions. 

By Steve Macfarlane When Mexican director Felipe Cazals died this past October at the age of 84, domestic and international press alike cited the political importance of his films, while Guillermo del Toro called Cazals an “exemplary and noble teacher” on Twitter. But if the filmmaker’s stature within his home country is ironclad today, his…

By Katherine Connell A maze is designed to puzzle and possibly frustrate; conversely, the pleasure of a labyrinth is in submitting oneself to a route that, when traversed, might reveal the mind of its designer. This is certainly true of the late Obayashi Nobuhiko’s Labyrinth of Cinema (2019), one of the headlining films of Montréal’s…

In Toronto, where film festivals have become something of a cottage industry (with over 150 operating on an annual basis), it’s particularly hard not to feel the cruel irony of the present moment. Festivals remain one of the last holdouts for appreciating films in a public setting in the face of the steady march of streaming and VOD; now, they are faced with the stark choice of either postponing their events entirely, or, as with Images, pivoting to an online model that strikes at their very raison d’être.

By Phil Coldiron We still have not found a satisfactory way to show new short films. The approach taken for the shorts competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam—to treat ticketed programs as minimally thematic clusters of individual screenings, separated by a brief question and answer session with the filmmaker if present (and most were)—argues,…

By Katherine Connell Chronicling the life of the legendary Rio de Janeiro drag performer, hustler, and street fighter, Madame Satã (2002) announced Karim Aïnouz as a filmmaker attuned to the conceptual richness and subversive potential found within liminal spaces: individuals who fluctuate between seemingly fixed identity categories, and whose fullness of life outside the social…

If one were to enumerate the major trends in sophisticated American filmmaking in the last decade, it seems to me that Zachary Epcar’s films would provide an adequate summary of such a list. In their wit, their formal restlessness, and their sharp conception of certain stickier corners of the American psyche, they continue the Nelson-Land tradition. Given the intense pleasures of their surfaces and textures, both visual and aural, I will simply attempt to describe them in as much detail as possible, while focusing on the four major works Epcar has made to date.

Cinéma vérité is all too easy to misunderstand, all too easy to take literally. Worst of all, it’s all too easy to piously debunk—even by some of its most famous practitioners. Frederick Wiseman, when interviewed for Peter Wintonick’s Cinéma vérité: Defining the Moment (1999), said that “my definition of cinéma vérité is that it’s a pompous French term that has no meaning.”

By Christopher Small  Almost anyone who has spent a prolonged period at a film festival understands the soothing familiarity of a good pre-movie festival spot, those throwaway bits of business that bleary-eyed delegates sit through upwards of 40 times over the course of a week. Everybody reading this doubtless has their favourites; my sense is…

By Justine Smith  The world is in turmoil, and at this year’s Recontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, documentaries from around the world grappled with our new reality. Drawing from a wide range of experiences and approaching the idea of non-fiction from an array of perspectives, the films showed a diverse programming mandate; meanwhile the…

  By Angelo Muredda The first image we see in Lina Rodriguez’s deceptively modest second feature Mañana a esta hora (This Time Tomorrow) is something of a puzzle: a gradually lightening shot of a tree in a leafy park in Bogotá, standing sturdy and still. While this depopulated, evergreen overture might seem to promise an…

By Dan Sullivan Cinema Scope: Good Time has a propulsive feeling of forward momentum, a kind of punchiness, which was also present in flashes in Heaven Knows What (2014). Your work has always been marked by a chaotic energy—but here it’s so consistent and sustained. Was that always the idea for the film, and how…

By Adam Nayman At the end of Sandy Wexler, the film’s eponymous Hollywood talent manager (Adam Sandler), who has come out the other end of a heart attack, grabs the microphone at a party filled with his showbiz family and belts out a nasal, atonal rendition of Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”…

By Jordan Cronk “This film tells the story of a boy who turned into a bird.” Portending something fantastic, these are the first words spoken in Tales of Two Who Dreamt, a cagey new feature co-directed by Andrea Bussmann and Nicolás Pereda. Set in an anonymous, rundown apartment complex on the margins of Toronto, this…

By Phil Coldiron Liberty City, the Miami neighbourhood Barry Jenkins hails from and the setting for much of Moonlight, his exceptional second feature, has a median annual household income of under $22,000; 47% of its population lives below the United States federal poverty line, while nearly a third of working-age adults are unemployed. Grown up…

By Celluloid Liberation Front.  “Black is not a colour, it’s an attitude.” —James Baldwin Heavyweight champion in the fight for racial equality and social justice, poet, rhapsodic loudmouth, adorable smart-ass, magician, wisecracker extraordinaire, Muhammad Ali, né Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., had survived his own death long before dying. No screen, big or small, will ever…

By Quintín There are three films to be found in From Afar, an altogether astute, pompous, and false work that won the Golden Lion this year in Venice thanks to jury president Alfonso Cuarón and his band of collaborators. The first one is a story of seduction between mechanics: Armando (Alfredo Castro), a lonely and…

By Leo Goldsmith. The term “documentary,” with all of its multifarious associations and attenuated definitions, has become an increasingly ineffective designation in recent years. While generic classifications of and distinctions within the category have long proven problematic (if not arbitrary), the recent documentary turn in the art world, combined with contemporary cinema’s increased cross-pollination of…

By Angelo Muredda. Early in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, an army of young Islamic rebels marches into a mosque, automatic rifles slung at their sides. It might look like the start of a proper siege if we hadn’t just seen the same men ineptly chasing a gazelle through the desert in a jeep (calling to mind…

By Calum Marsh Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner tells a simple story: two fiftysomething men develop what can only be described, in clichéd trailer-speak, as an unlikely friendship. Thankfully this proves less precious than it sounds. Its men are serious, world-weary, and inhabited so naturally by their performers that they seem to carry the…

By Kiva Reardon The question of whether the horror genre is dead has become as predictable as the very cinematic ouroboroi—such as Saws and Paranormal Activities, constantly finding new ways to die within the same immovable structure—that tend to inspire such sweeping generalizations. It’s also necrophiliac in nature: if horror is dead, why do people…

By Jerry White “Depicting the typical man of the new era means creating images of people who live, work and struggle with the conviction that they are masters of the revolution and the work of socialist construction…Stressing this principle of Chajusong and creating human images based on the concept of Juche allows literature to make…

By Olaf Möller Festivals, the bigger ones at least, are among the last bastions of subsidized non-academic film publication. Traditionally, important or marginal retrospectives were accompanied by nice books or at least representative pamphlets authored usually by journalists—folks who knew how to build up an interest for something, keep the masses flowing into the venues…