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Filmmaker Magazine

Filmmaker Magazine is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Casey Cipriani, Natalia Keogan, Rania Richardson, Vadim Rizov.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Echoes of the Orient (2025) Vadim Rizov Echoes’s distinguishing features include its adept widescreen compositions—an aspect ratio unusual for this pocket of slow cinema—and its equally non-standard, lowkey but consistent sense of humor and extreme awareness of the present moment.
Posted Nov 22, 2025  Edit critic review
Far in the Middle of the East (2025) Vadim Rizov Well-executed, dramatically bracing and well-composed.
Posted Nov 22, 2025  Edit critic review
Sermon to the Void (2025) Vadim Rizov The film’s real business is the non-stop purveying of images you’ve never seen before, building off a strong foundation of material shot in a desert over the course of 11 months.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Le Lac (2025) Vadim Rizov The most stereotypically “Swiss” movie imaginable.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Saikai Paradise (2025) Vadim Rizov So determinedly “gentle” and “low-key” that it made me wonder how many Japanese movies I’ve seen that could be called Still Walking beyond Kore-eda Hirokazu’s tonal prototype.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Fire of Wind (2024) Vadim Rizov If "Fire" is familiar in both its austerity and quasi-revolutionary solidarity, Mateus's command of her craft is clear, and her service in maintaining a particular lineage of severity admirable.
Posted Oct 30, 2025  Edit critic review
Gavagai (2025) Vadim Rizov Köhler’s a sneaky filmmaker, using conventional visual language and fully fleshed-out plotting to wrongfoot expectations in ways you couldn’t see coming, and it’s a pleasure to have him back for his first film in six years (!).
Posted Oct 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Duse (2025) Vadim Rizov Duse hit because of its core tenet: History is a real thing that actually exists.
Posted Oct 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Strange River (2025) Vadim Rizov Strange River is a fine but familiar coming-of-age saga.
Posted Oct 07, 2025  Edit critic review
Gloaming in Luomu (2025) Vadim Rizov The movie is basically never funny, nor is it especially pregnant with longing for a missing partner; it’s just inert.
Posted Oct 07, 2025  Edit critic review
Black Rabbit, White Rabbit (2025) Vadim Rizov For about an hour, Black Rabbit is great fun, but unfortunately Mokri’s film is 138 minutes long.
Posted Oct 07, 2025  Edit critic review
The River That Holds Our Hands (2025) Vadim Rizov The movie is what we’d call a “promising first feature,” full of slow cinema compositional skill but a little low on the ideas necessary to get to even 85 minutes.
Posted Oct 07, 2025  Edit critic review
If On a Winter's Night (2025) Vadim Rizov Both lead performers convincingly embody the lived-in quicksilver intimacy of an infatuated couple being slowly worn down, and watching the light slowly fade from their eyes is fairly devastating.
Posted Oct 07, 2025  Edit critic review
To the Victory! (2025) Vadim Rizov I found it all very funny and sharp.
Posted Oct 02, 2025  Edit critic review
The Fence (2025) Vadim Rizov The Fence seems to be an inexplicably faithful adaptation of a bad play.
Posted Sep 24, 2025  Edit critic review
The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025) Vadim Rizov I would describe the film’s political diagnosis as both accurate and unsurprising; its real meat is in further illuminating the contours of Assayas’s life-long project.
Posted Sep 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Vadim Rizov I’m glad to see mystery scholarship-in-action continue to get such a lavish stage in all its sub-genre forms.
Posted Sep 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Blue Moon (2025) Vadim Rizov Kaplow’s script is a curious example of the biopic, bucking convention in several ways.
Posted Sep 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Mare's Nest (2025) Vadim Rizov A lot of the film is unexceptional.
Posted Sep 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Forastera (2025) Natalia Keogan Set on the Spanish island of Mallorca, the ethereal sunshine and crystalline blue of the Mediterranean cast a melancholy haze upon a vacationing family that must suddenly mourn the passing of [its] matriarch.
Posted Sep 09, 2025  Edit critic review
Promise, I'll Be Fine (2024) Vadim Rizov The film is a spritely piece of work, whose frequently moving camera renders spectacular kinetic views of mopeds racing through imposing forests.
Posted Jul 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Dust Be My Destiny (1939) Vadim Rizov Some "genius of the system" virtues include typically breathtaking black-and-white cinematography by James Wong Howe and a script by Robert Rossen of such dialogue pungency that it sometimes rises to Sweet Smell of Success levels of acridness.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Sand City (2025) Vadim Rizov Mountains of crushed glass and sand are constant attractions, and the film is adroit at exploiting scalar differences in its under-construction landscapes.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
The Luminous Life (2025) Vadim Rizov Perhaps the film’s greatest pleasure is spending time with 24-year-olds who read books older than themselves and don’t pheremonally emit the desire to either produce or stream content.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Broken Voices (2025) Vadim Rizov Provaznik introduces signs of barely articulated unease slowly but never lets them primarily drive the narrative until the very end.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Out of Love (2025) Vadim Rizov The film is a tearjerker semi-disguised as a nuanced psychological drama; Ambrosioni hits a few narrative beats repeatedly to diminishing effect.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
The Visitor (2025) Vadim Rizov As his own 16mm DP, Katkus has a terrific eye for both static shots and slow lateral dollies but isn’t afraid to deploy the occasional rapid-fire zoom as necessary to let performers spontaneously reset the frame.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
The Travel Companion (2025) Natalia Keogan A commentary on the fragility of male ego and the hilarious indignities of making art in New York City, The Travel Companion is a prescient portrait of our current cultural tensions, emphasizing the struggles that [specifically] befall filmmakers.
Posted Jun 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Underland (2025) Natalia Keogan Underland isn’t merely notable for its ability to capture abject darkness...but for its stellar soundscape that whirrs, drones, hums and echoes, almost replicating the sensitivity one’s ears achieve when the light suddenly vanishes.
Posted Jun 10, 2025  Edit critic review
Night Passengers (2025) Vadim Rizov This is thoroughly immersive low-key social realism; I entered ready to leave at any time but happily stayed til the end.
Posted Jun 02, 2025  Edit critic review
The Mastermind (2025) Vadim Rizov The movie alternates between comedy of a kind and gripping suspense which emerges from nowhere, which is one of Reichardt’s most reliable and mysteriously-emerging modes.
Posted May 27, 2025  Edit critic review
The Secret Agent (2025) Vadim Rizov While I hate to sound like a development executive, the emotional core here eludes me.
Posted May 23, 2025  Edit critic review
It Was Just an Accident (2025) Vadim Rizov The movie continually shifts between an impulse towards violent catharsis and a nearly equally strong drive towards comedy.
Posted May 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Nouvelle Vague (2025) Vadim Rizov The film is disappointingly pointless, the worst-case version of what I feared: a movie whose POV is basically “Breathless was cool.”
Posted May 18, 2025  Edit critic review
The Phoenician Scheme (2025) Vadim Rizov I liked the film as much for its oddnesses as its more familiarly successful, less alienating qualities.
Posted May 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Two Prosecutors (2025) Vadim Rizov Loznitsa’s eye remains immaculate.
Posted May 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Sound of Falling (2025) Vadim Rizov There’s a definite intent to keep audiences unmoored, as in the film’s most-often-deployed sound, a vinyl-record click building to a white noise hiss, an anti-literal-minded device that quickly loses its effectiveness.
Posted May 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Chronicle (2025) Vadim Rizov Every shot is a setpiece, almost to the point of over-satiation—important, because there’s maybe six lines of dialogue in the whole movie, the first of which doesn’t arrive for 25 minutes.
Posted May 08, 2025  Edit critic review
Roikin <3 (2025) Vadim Rizov The film is assertively directed by Claudia Mollese.
Posted May 08, 2025  Edit critic review
A Brief History of Chasing Storms (2025) Vadim Rizov Primarily self-funded, Miller’s feature has the ever-so-slightly off-kilter rhythm of an experimental filmmaker trying to make something like his idea of a crowdpleaser.
Posted May 08, 2025  Edit critic review
The Prince of Nanawa (2025) Vadim Rizov Parceling out small pieces of information that explicate Ángel’s past while setting up the film’s future trajectory, The Prince of Nanawa ticks right along for its first 100 minutes.
Posted May 08, 2025  Edit critic review
Soldiers of Light (2025) Vadim Rizov The film vividly illustrates how, in the absence of other readily available solutions, valid dissatisfaction with the state of things leads down a slippery conspiratorial slope.
Posted May 08, 2025  Edit critic review
To the West, in Zapata (2025) Vadim Rizov The last ten minutes don’t land but it’s nonetheless a very impressive debut, uber-formalist while in complete solidarity with its subjects.
Posted Apr 29, 2025  Edit critic review
Make it Look Real (2024) Vadim Rizov The interactions between Muhammad and customers blithely indifferent to perspective as a baseline visual principle are predictably semi-comic, but the meat of the film is in its director-subject interplay.
Posted Mar 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Mountain Village (2013) Vadim Rizov Hu operates in a much more orthodox, mildly punishing oral history vein, offering extended shots of elderly villagers remembering famine in repetitive, unbroken stretches.
Posted Mar 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Resurrection (2024) Vadim Rizov Throughout, Hu’s artful eye takes repeated advantage of smoke emanated sporadically by fireworks set off in memory of the dead and perpetually by old men relentlessly smoking.
Posted Mar 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Sleep #2 (2024) Vadim Rizov In interviews, Jude likes to talk about embracing imperfection... I think it wouldn’t hurt if he were to try for perfection, secure as he would be in the knowledge that since the immaculate is beyond human capability, error will be introduced regardless.
Posted Mar 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Dear Beautiful Beloved (2024) Vadim Rizov I was left as confused as the director seemed to be about what watching the film might achieve for anyone artistically or politically.
Posted Mar 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Listen to the Voices (2025) Vadim Rizov This is a credible feature debut, even if its ending does not quite land.
Posted Mar 25, 2025  Edit critic review
WTO/99 (2025) Vadim Rizov Complaints aside, WTO/99 did successfully plunge me back into a fog of millennial anti-nostalgia.
Posted Mar 25, 2025  Edit critic review
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