Pin de Fartie (2025), directed by independent Argentinian collective El Pampero Cine member Alejo Moguillansky, is less an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Fin de Partie (1957) than a centrifugal expansion unfolding into multiple nested narratives riffing on the play’s themes: death, departure and the approach of an ending. Marking a tonal shift from Moguillansky’s ensemble comedies, Pin de Fartie possesses a sense of wistful tragedy. The title refers to the end of a chess game; here, it signals the twilight of relationships––both filial and romantic––against the current approach of the end of civilization. Each sequence of Pin de […]

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Ken Jacobs wasn’t just a single (albeit huge) formative force in experimental film, but a river through which an array of streams flowed to their own artistic destinations. For New Yorkers, the Williamsburg native was an easily-sighted local legend: The first time I remember seeing him speak was in 2019 at a MoMI memorial screening of work by Phil Solomon, one of his many notable students at SUNY-Binghamton. Jacobs was in full stentorian mode, taking to the stage to proclaim, by way of sorrowful introduction, that “a teacher should not outlive his students.” Later that year, he was in the […]

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The first conversation I had in Busan was with a Malaysia-based genre film buyer who told me about the recent challenges of dealing with his adopted country’s famously rigid censor board while clearing promotional materials for a new Bollywood film, which he described as a less-violent John Wick. The poster showed the lead actor holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette; unsurprisingly, the board nixed both elements and rejected the compromise of erasing them while leaving smoke still trailing out of the star’s mouth. In the end, the buyer was provided with an image of the hero on […]

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In 2012, Mark Jenkin wrote his self-proclaimed manifesto “Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13,” a series of vows of chastity à la Dogme 95; among other strictures, the Cornish director promised to shoot his films in black-and-white, keep them under 80 minutes and use only natural or available light, post-synched sound and diegetic music. Only a handful of projects Jenkin’s made since then would meet all those criteria. But even as his productions have steadily gotten bigger after his BAFTA-winning 2019 breakthrough Bait, his filmmaking approach hasn’t drastically changed. Jenkin wears many hats—aside from writing and directing, he routinely edits and […]

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Catherine LeFrere plays Isabella Blow in the inventive Off-Broadway production House of McQueen at The Mansion At Hudson Yards in New York City. The play depicts the life of the brilliant fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who was discovered by Blow. On this episode, LeFrere takes us on a deep dive into the creation of her version of Isabella. She talks about starting with the voice, why she doesn’t want to be off-book in first rehearsals, the importance of playing off the audience, and much more. House of McQueen has been extending into November. Back To One can be found wherever […]

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What does the sublime sound like? For Graham Reznick, serving as the sound designer for Bryn Chaney’s psychological thriller Rabbit Trap (available on digital Sept. 30, from Magnolia Pictures) was a sustained exercise in experimenting with aural narrative storytelling, searching for the same sorts of subliminally haunting sound effects that alternately entrance and unsettle the film’s musician protagonists. When Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) move to a remote house in rural Wales, they seek to draw sounds out of the local landscape, with Daphne interpolating and manipulating Darcy’s field recordings to create experimental compositions marrying electronic distortion […]

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The 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival marked the penultimate edition for its director José Luis Rebordinos, who has grown and expanded the event on Spain’s northern Basque coastline over his 15 years at the helm. One noticeable element of his programming down the years has been its satisfying cohesion, with themes frequently running across the festival’s different strands so that discussion of ideas is able to break out beyond a single movie into wider debate. Perhaps, as he begins to contemplate passing the baton onwards, it should come as little surprise then, that one of this year’s key subjects […]

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Documentary essayist Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature Evidence is, artistically speaking, both a concerted continuation and marked departure. On the one hand, it furthers her career-long penchant for braiding political rhetoric, environmental portraits and American mythology; on the other, it filters these observations through a distinctly personal lens, even featuring a rare on-screen appearance for the director. The film opens with Schmitt showcasing an impressive collection of dolls, childhood gifts that her father brought back from frequent international business trips. Their national diversity and craftsmanship is impressive—most adorn traditional garb, some possess the ability to blink—yet they all translate the […]

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While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that’s as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting — artistically, managerially, financially — the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, his massive, multinational, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. And far fewer documentarians have a nephew like Aaron Brookner, […]

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In Bouchra, 3D animated anthropomorphic animals may populate the world, but the intricacies of their lives are unmistakably human. This approach is par for the course for the film’s co-directors, the Brooklyn-based visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, whose bite-size episodic project 2 Lizards captivated viewers during the early stages of lockdown in 2020—and landed them on our 25 New Faces of Film list the same year. In the latter project, the eponymous 3D-rendered lizards (voiced by Bennani and Barki) shoot the shit about celebrities, news coverage, pandemic-era anxieties and the morbid relief of being able to shirk social […]

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