Women voting, no big deal, right? But it is. For centuries, British women not only lacked the vote but enjoyed no rights within the home. Requests for justice were met with immovable male condescension until the requests escalated into demands and women activists embarked on a Weather Underground-style insurgency. Contrary to their prim image today, […]

It’s hard to imagine a more fascinating place on earth than Chile. If we had to pick one country to show an alien race what varying geographical features our planet has to offer, it would probably be that country. It has more than 4,000 kilometers of coastline and the highest volcano and part of the […]

Based on real events, the story portrayed in this layered film occurs in 1996 in Ethiopia, just three years after women were granted equal rights under the law. In the capitol city of Addis Ababa, social services have been established to assist women and girls, including free legal aid. Meaza Ashenafi (Meron Getnet) heads the […]

Gimmicks and tricks have been around since the birth of cinema, whether it be Cinemascope, 3-D, or Smell-o-Vision (thank you, John Waters). The ones that stood the test of time generally enhance the overall cinematic experience. Others, such as the Dogme 95 movement and, please God, found footage films, fade into the collective memory of […]

The New York Film Festival’s impressive lineup this year includes a number of celebrated directors from Asia. Perhaps the most anticipated of these, prior to its Cannes premiere, was Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, his exquisite take on the martial arts film, which netted Hou a best director prize at Cannes. Hou will make a rare […]

As the son of Turkish immigrants to Germany, writer/director Fatih Akin specifically cites Istanbul-born Elia Kazan’s America America (1963), with its bitter scenes of the Turks’ oppressive treatment of minorities during the end of Ottoman control, as inspiring him to more fully portray the devastation of the Armenian people during World War I. The Cut […]

If you take the word sweet, whisk away the S and move a few letters around, you end up with twee. Asia Argento’s Misunderstood veers between the two states while chronicling the travails of a preteen girl and her eccentric family in 1980s Rome. Along the way the film flirts with peril and incendiary themes, […]

One of the most pessimistic, yet accurate, onscreen portrayals of modern life in quite some time, writer/director Yury Bykov’s The Fool is the best kind of morality tale, because it all but denies the very existence of morality. In the Russian town where the film transpires, it has become exceedingly rare to have a shred […]

For director Morgan Matthews’s first feature film, he drew upon a documentary he produced and directed about the selection and training of the British team for the 2006 International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), titled Brilliant Young Minds (2007). Many of the young competitors had a form of autism, which that film linked to their mathematical ability. […]