MARAMA — the haunting new film from New Zealand — is not easy to describe… and that’s exactly the point. Filmmaker Taratoa Stappard calls it a “Māori Gothic ghost story.” One of its stars goes further: Jane Eyre on a bad acid trip. What unfolds is something far more...
Media consolidation. It’s accelerating. Fewer owners. Fewer voices. Whether you’re watching the so-called “Orbán playbook” unfold across Eastern Europe, or noticing that CNN and 60 Minutes could one day soon answer to the same boardroom, a new reality...
Mental illness. Movies tend to handle it one of two ways — it’s either a major problem, leading to crisis and drama. Or it’s somehow something funny, leading to laughter and comedy. Rarely anything in between. But in his debut feature FANTASY LIFE,...
We’re going out on a limb and saying it plainly: Christian Petzold is one of the finest and most consistently compelling filmmakers working in film today. While his first five features never received U.S. theatrical release, he broke through to American arthouse...
According to Wikipedia, a shtetl is the Yiddish term for the small towns across Eastern Europe where many Ashkenazi Jewish communities lived before the Holocaust. But for those of us born after the Shoah, the word carries something almost mystical. It...
