There are endless ways a movie can frustrate a viewer. In the case of Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, it’s the frustration of watching a movie dance on the periphery of greatness but refuse to cross the line and do something truly remarkable.

From its opening frames, Vladlena Sandu's essayist drama announces itself as an intimate reckoning with a childhood disrupted by violence, both personal and political. War, propaganda, and mistreatment shape her upbringing in Grozny during the last years of the Soviet Regime up until the Russian occupation. Wavering between remembrance, reenactment, and re-imagination, her first feature-length work Memory transforms personal trauma into a cinematic testimony of infantile resilience.

After taking home the golden wolf statue for Best Feature Film at last year’s Black Nights Film Festival with Silent City Driver, Sengedorj Janchivdorj returns to Tallinn with another melancholic m…

Careful what you wish for, because you just might get it and more. That is what befalls college professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage). He is a stunted middle-aged man, a man with grand professiona…

A decade after his last cinematic effort, Neeraj Ghaywan returns with a prestige project, shepherded by executive producer Martin Scorsese, that pairs the lyrical sentiment of his early work with a timely social realism. The latter is grounded in Basharat Peer’s 2020 article that inspired the plot and its paradigmatic portrayal of male friendship. Stifled aspiration and systemic injustice in contemporary India form the background of the two young main characters' transformative journey away from their rural home and impoverished families, and back again.

Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) is struggling. An American living in Japan, Phillip is an outsider. He is lonely, spending his evenings looking out his apartment window to see a variety of lo…

The original 1987 film adaptation of The Running Man has seen a critical re-appraisal over the years, though one fact remains: it is not really Stephen King’s The Running Man. It does distill many …

Dust Bunny is a wild concoction. Best known for his work in television with series such as Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, and American Gods, Bryan Fuller makes his feature film directorial debut with Dust Bunny. Originally pitched by Fuller as a “family horror film,” it also has plenty of roots in dark fantasy, sci-fi action, and crime. It is sort of…

Much like its main character, Andrés Clariond's slippery satire comes frustratingly close to striking political gold. But rather than snatching the comedic crown - or in the case of the unlucky protagonist aiming for Mexico’s highest state office, the presidency - he lands an embarrassing misfire, before retreating into private excess which turns increasingly absurdist. The most blatant aspect of this curious cinematic combination of lavishness and ludicrousness is the evocation of the titular French estate.

After taking home the golden wolf statue for Best Feature Film at last year’s Black Nights Film Festival with Silent City Driver, Sengedorj Janchivdorj returns to Tallinn with another melancholic meditation on lost connections, loneliness, and laconic humor. Ulaanbaatar, with its glistening skyline set against the endless width of the Mongolian steppe, is once more a central character to the bittersweet story, filled with small connections to the director-writer's prior work.

The second new film from writer-director Osgood Perkins released this year, Keeper follows Liz (Tatiana Maslany) as she embarks on a romantic getaway with her boyfriend Dr. Malcolm Westbridge (Rossif Sutherland). Together now for one year, Liz is overwhelmed with how happy she feels. This is unusual for her, both having a relationship that lasts this long and to feel so satisfied in one.

Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) is struggling. An American living in Japan, Phillip is an outsider. He is lonely, spending his evenings looking out his apartment window to see a variety of locals living their ordinary lives in the apartment building across the street. Professionally, he is an actor who had a successful role in a cheesy toothpaste commercial, but none of his work is really paying the bills.

The “hunger shack,” as the original title of Karolis Kaupinis’ bleak history lesson translates, is not only the cramped Vilnius industrialized flat in which the handful of characters gather, it is also a somber symbol for a small nation starved for a freedom that, in the crucial days of the tight plot, feels both just within reach and far away.

Motherhood, militarism, and moral ambiguity collide in Netalie Braun's disquieting drama Oxygen. Prior to its run at Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival in the Best of Festivals section, the film took the top prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival, causing a stir for its supposedly anti-war message. This, however, is both complicated and compromised by the murky motivations of its protective protagonist who is egoistic at best and an outright sociopath at worst.

The original 1987 film adaptation of The Running Man has seen a critical re-appraisal over the years, though one fact remains: it is not really Stephen King’s The Running Man. It does distill many of the same themes while working within a similar framework, but it is a different story. With this re-adaptation, director Edgar Wright - who co-wrote the script with…

For a film among those which prominently provoked Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar to threaten that he would cut off all funding for the Ophir Awards, Shai Carmeli‑Pollak’s meandering dra…

In the inevitable follow-up to his 2022 survival saga Sisu, Jalmari Helander expands the folkloric brutality of the original into a more mythic action odyssey that occasionally overreaches but rarely ceases to entertain. Returning as the indestructible ex-commando Aatami Korpi, Jorma Tommila brings the same granite-faced charisma to the lead, whose bare-bones biography is slightly expanded. Gritty fight scenes and over-the-top action pieces that brought the first part financial success are still the main feature.

For those not very versed in Eastern European history, "Livonia" might sound like the name of a medieval country straight from a fantasy horror story, just like the anarchic animated tale which director-brothers Raitis and Lauris Ābele bring to Tallinn's Black Nights Film Festival. In fact, Livonia is a historical region which, by the end of the 13th century, comprised most of what today is Estonia and Latvia.

For centuries, Ferdinand Magellan’s legacy lived in the shadows of that of more prominent and popular explorers such as Christopher Columbus. The latter’s voyages were also financed by the Spanish crown that gave Magellan his big sailing shot at fame when the Portuguese King Manuel I refused to support his daring plan: to sail around an only crudely sketched-out South America into the Pacific Ocean (which by then wasn’t even called the “Pacific Ocean” since that name, too, came from Magellan).