It's no secret that I am a big fan of the Eurimages funding scheme and the projects it backs, and Foxtrot is no exception. This dark, multi-tonal Israeli, French, German and Swiss co-production carries all the hallmarks of a good...
Muayad Alayan´s sophomore feature The Reports on Sarah and Saleem infuses genre sensibilities into arthouse drama against the backdrop of a political conflict
Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami's passing in 2016 was very unexpected. Among all the cultural luminaries who passed on recently, personally Kiarostami's death really saddened me the most. His deeply humanistic, genre and form transcending cinema has been truly unique and...
Ziad Doueiri, whose Hollywood credentials include being a cameraman for most of Quentin Tarantino's earlier films (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown), has made several films in his native Lebanon (West Beirut, The Attack, Lila Says). With his new...
Director Ziad Doueiri new film never wavers from reminding us that Tony and Yasser are ordinary working people living in a country with a very complex history where one can't separate their politics or identity from their ordinary lives.
Blunt, angry and eye-opening, Tehran Taboo offers a scathing portrait of Iran’s largest city. Think of it as Short Cuts meets Persepolis, although that facile shorthand does not begin to get at just how much is going on, plot and...
The young Iranina helmer Ali Asgari depicts the conflict of young generation with traditions veiled as coming-of-age doubling as a mild social thriller
There's no dampening the enthusiasm from fantastic cinema around the world and one of the newer events to get in on the act is the Maskoon Fantastic Film Festival, which is the only festival that introduces genre cinema to the...
It's no secret that I am a big fan of the Eurimages funding scheme and the projects it backs, and Foxtrot is no exception. This dark, multi-tonal Israeli, French, German and Swiss co-production carries all the hallmarks of a good...
Canadian dates have been announced for the North American release of Zaradasht Ahmed's documentary Nowhere to Hide. The award winning documentary will open here in Toronto and in Vancouver on June 30th. We have included the trailer below. Canadian...
It could be said that there was disappointment when Big Bad Wolves and Rabies directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado bowed out of the Death Wish remake. Yet I think we would all agree that we would rather see something...
In a relatively short six years of existence, Dallas' Oak Cliff Film Festival has put itself on the map as one of the most adventurous and carefully curated events in the Southwest. Based in the historic southern Oak Cliff neighrborhood...
Egyptian-Swedish writer-director Tarik Saleh won raves at Sundance with his taut, Cairo-set thriller The Nile Hilton Incident - so many raves, in fact, that he ended up walking away with the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize. This tale of justice...
The Tribeca Film Festival returns for its 16th edition, running at various venues through April 30. As usual, it doesn't lack for boldface names and big events, opening with Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, a documentary about the legendary...
This Oscar weekend's offerings include: At BAM Rose Cinemas, the continuation of the series "The Art of the Social Thriller," curated by Jordan Peele (half of the brilliant sketch duo Key & Peele), of films that inspired his feature directorial debut Get Out,...
It's all about the world in May for the Criterion Collection. The company announced their lineup for the month and two titles jumped out at me. Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World is a movie I watched on multiple occasions years ago,...
With his latest film, The Salesman, Asghar Farhadi once again, proves his mastery in presenting complexities of human relationships within the confounds of his native country Iran, but also demonstrating that even there are political and cultural differences among us, deep down, certain things in life are constant and universal.
This year, 23 Screen Anarchists from 11 countries around the globe shared with us 129 films for consideration in our collective top ten movies of 2016. Our criteria was simple: an individual contributor could include a film on their ballot...
Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh follows up his crime thriller Tommy with The Nile Hilton Incident, a Cairo set thriller starring Fares Fares - best known these days for his role in the hugely successful Department Q series of Danish crime...
