2025 holds great promise for global independent and arthouse cinema from the return of old masters to a rich trove of breakthroughs by debut directors. Many of these films have received critical acclaim at film festivals while others have been flying a bit under the radar. Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof) In Farsi…
I’m a big fan of this manifesto against best of the year lists, which applies as much to film as it does to books and restaurants. Since many of the sources of our collective pleasures are hard to reduce to a subjective opinion on contemporaneity and relevance within a given year. In the spirit of…
What lingers most from my year of going to the cinema in 2024 is not a particular image but an experience of time—or rather, several experiences of time as explored by filmmakers across the decades through a cultural and political inquiry into the intimate lives of women in various parts of Asia. This selection of…
All We Imagine As Light is filled with moments of beauty: moonlight filtering through cobalt saris fluttering by the open window as two women whisper in bed; a transcendent act of lovemaking suffused in golden light; a static shot of a woman reading verses of Malayalam poetry penned by a hesitant lover lit by the…
Girls Will Be Girls, Shuchi Talati’s sharply observed debut feature, begins both literally and figuratively on a mountaintop. Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) is the first girl to become head prefect at her elite, co-educational boarding school in an unnamed town in the Himalayan foothills of Northern India. Mira embodies the focus and diligence of a straightlaced…
Crossing, the fourth feature film from Swedish-Georgian director and screenwriter Levan Akin, is at its heart an immersive quest for connection and catharsis. The film opens in Batumi, the port city on the Black Sea coast of Georgia where retired schoolteacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) begins a journey to Istanbul accompanied by Achi (Lucas Kankava), a…
In the opening minutes of Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, the third feature film from director Elene Naveriani, we meet Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), an austere store owner in a remote village in Georgia, picking blackberries in the wild. She is about to bite into a blackberry when she sees a blackbird. While she is admiring the bird,…