A marvelously inventive throwback to underground comix of Kim Deitch and the antic handdrawn animation of Sally Cruikshank and Suzan Pitt, Endless Cookie takes us on a wild ride with the half-brothers Scriver—Peter is the Indigenous kid, Seth the white one—as they journey back to 1980s Toronto and the icily remote regions of Shamattawa, a First Nations community in northern Manitoba, in search of family ties and divides. The hilarious tales, many of them involving chaotic menageries of caribou, dogs,…

Johnnie To’s incisive exploration of power dynamics within Hong Kong’s triad societies marked a new political dimension in his career. As two rival gang leaders (Simon Yam and Tony Leung Ka-fai) vie for control of the Wo Shing Society, To strips away the glamor often associated with gangster films to reveal a world of shifting alliances and ruthless ambition. The director’s restrained approach, favoring tense conversations and sudden bursts of violence over elaborate action sequences, creates a palpable atmosphere of…

Who said time heals all wounds? Shot in her hometown of El Prat de Llobregat (located in the southwestern periphery of Barcelona) with an impressive cast of nonprofessional actors, Catalan writer-director Laura Ferrés’s alternately tender, clever, and mysterious debut feature mixes realism with melodrama in the story of a fiftysomething casting director who—while on an assignment to find “normal-looking people” for a left-leaning political party’s campaign video—unwittingly befriends the woman who gave birth to and abandoned her as a teenager…

Journalist Shiori Itō turns the camera on herself in a breathtakingly courageous investigation of her own sexual assault, which resulted in a landmark case for the Me Too movement in Japan. From courtrooms to video diary entries, the film follows Itō’s 2017 court battle in real time, which is made all the more gripping by its palpable mix of journalistic acumen and harrowing trauma. Along the journey to bring Itō’s high-powered attacker to justice, Black Box Diaries also becomes an…

In September 2022, Mediateca Onshore was inaugurated in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau, marking a half-century of Guinean cinema production. Resonance Spiral documents the construction of this community screening space—but what’s being built is so much more. Part of a decade-long project instigated by filmmakers and artists Filipa César, Sana na N’Hada, and Marinho de Pina, among others, the building is a site for preserving Guinean militant cinema histories, a portal for making audiovisual archives from of the country’s revolutionary…

Kumjana Novakova’s award-winning second feature shakes open the archive of what has come to be known as the Foča Rape Camp Trial, which led to the codification of mass rape and sexual enslavement as a weapon of war as crimes against humanity under international law. Drawing on survivor testimonies that reveal the depths of war crimes committed against women and girls during the Bosnian War, Novakova’s unflinching film preserves the subjects’ anonymity while bearing witness to their collective memory—and their…

To Save and Project kicks off on January 11 with the North American premiere of Albert Parker’s The Black Pirate, introduced by filmmaker Alexander Payne (The Holdovers, Election). As MoMA curator Dave Kehr, who helped oversee the painstaking and complicated restoration, observes, “Douglas Fairbanks didn’t get to be the King of Hollywood by doing anything small, and when he decided to make a pirate movie—at the urging, in Hollywood legend, of the child star Jackie Coogan—he wanted color to reflect…