Frank Avella

Ava DuVernay’s new film Origin is as bold and ambitious as they come. It’s also one of the most thought-provoking, transfixing films of 2023. Why it hasn’t been in the awards conversation is a puzzle. At the center of this extraordinary cinematic achievement is a loving, thoughtful, and deeply complex performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who received her first Oscar nomination

Bhutanese filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji has done it again! The Monk and the Gun,his follow-up to the 2021 surprise Oscar-nominated gem Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, made the Oscar shortlist -- just one step away from snagging another sleeper nomination. His new film is a keenly satiric meditation on, and gentle critique of, westernization. The film slyly, but fairly,

I’d like to begin with a plea to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to PLEASE consider increasing the International feature category to allow for ten nominations. On average, there a…

Brit thesp Jodie Comer has had quite the meteoric rise in all three mediums. She splashed with her Emmy-winning role as Villanelle in the BBC thriller Killing Eve from 2018 to 2022. Prior to Eve, she had been featured in many UK TV shows. She also delivered a superb turn in Ridley Scott’s epic The Last Duel (2021), then took to

How many of us wish we could confront a family member or two and demand an apology for a past wrong? Marie (Reymonde Amsallem, in a performance that in a just world would make her an international star) has just married Dan (Eran More). They live in France but have journeyed to Israel to celebrate with Marie’s estranged Moroccan-Jewish relatives via

On October 12, 1972, a rugby team boarded Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 from Montevideo, Uruguay, headed for Santiago, Chile, for a scheduled game. Forty-five passengers, including crew, players, family members and friends, were on board. The plane crashed into the Andes and 29 of the 45 people survived the impact. For 72 days, the survivors endured extreme weather conditions, hunger,

In Cord Jefferson’s feature debut, American Fiction, adapted from the Percival Everett novel, Erasure, Jeffrey Wright plays Monk a frustrated author and professor of English Lit, who has grown tired of the cultural sensitivities of his students (much like Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tar) and the fact that he can’t seem to get his latest work published because it is deemed

Throughout Trần Anh Hùng’s delectable film The Taste of Things (The Pot-au-Feu), Eugénie Chatagne pours her soul into the meals she prepares for Dodin Bouffant, a renowned chef and restaurant owner. She is his personal cook. Eugénie is meticulous yet playful, passionate yet serene. We immediately understand why Dodin wants to marry her. Of course, it helps tremendously that she

Diego Vicentini’s Simón takes on Venezuela’s totalitarian government by creating a taut and visceral non-linear cinematic experience, based on factual accounts, about one young man’s harrowing journey from organized protester to prisoner to U.S. asylum seeker. Simón (a fierce Christian McGaggney) is haunted by past events in his native Venezuela where he and an organized group of students protested the growing lack of

Ireland’s International Oscar submission--and Documentary Feature hopeful--is the heartbreaking yet hopeful, In the Shadow of Beirut, directed by Stephen Gerard Kelly and Garry Keane. The doc follows four families currently living in the poverty-stricken Sabra and Shantila neighborhoods of Beirut in Lebanon, with particular focus on the children simply trying to survive. This is a region where civilians have been

Moldova is a landlocked country in the northeast corner of the Balkan region of Europe—bordered by Romania and Ukraine that achieved independence from the Soviet Union after glasnost and perestroika. It’s the second poorest country in Europe. A small region east of the Dniester river, along the Moldovian-Ukranian border known as Transnistria is a breakaway state established after a major conflict between

First-time feature filmmaker Miguel Ángel Ferrer has crafted a warm and affecting movie depicting the harsh realities of rural Venezuela that also offers hope with The Shadow of the Sun. The film centers on two siblings, Leo (Carlos Manuel Gonzalez), a blue-collar worker living with his nag of a girlfriend and his younger brother Alex (newcomer Anyelo Lopez) a deaf,

Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl) has gifted us with a beguiling and droll rom-com that only he can deliver, one where two lonely lovebirds meet and connect, but then through a series of calamitous, often-hilarious situations, lose touch, only to, by happenstance, meet again. Repeat. Stir. Get hit by a

South Korean filmmaker Um Tae-hwa’s ambitious third feature film, Concrete Utopia, is a dystopian disaster thriller that is also an intense psychological drama and a comment on class and power. The…

Feature film debuts are rarely as bold and surprising as Carmen Jaquier’s arresting work, Thunder, Switzerland’s International Feature Oscar Submission. The storytelling isn’t new, but the manner in which she tells it and many of the ideas she poses are fascinating and original. Like Jane Campion did with The Piano in 1993, Jaquier creates her own cinematic universe. And it’s

Celebrated Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone’s new work, Io capitano (I, Captain) is a truly absorbing, captivating tale of two Senegalese teens who save up their hard-earned money to emigrate to Europe for a better life (to hopefully be rappers). Garrone drew his inspiration from true stories and surrounded himself and the film with actual survivors. Seydou (an astonishing Seydou Sarr) and

In 2022, Australian and North Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski made his narrative feature debut with the chilling supernatural work You Won’t Be Alone, which premiered at the Sundance Film Fest…

Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania directed several award-winning shorts before her first feature, The Challet of Tunis, opened the ACID section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. She followed th…

The controversial yet groundbreaking Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir has been portrayed many times on both big and small screens, most notably in the 1981 Emmy-winning TV film A Woman Called Gold…

Two years ago, I took on the wacky but truly inspiring challenge of seeing as many of the 93 International Feature Film submissions as I could get access to—eventually 89. It sucked all my time, en…