The Beautiful Agony: Dissecting the Surrealist Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky in "The Idiot(s)"
Great works of Russian literature have long been defined by a singular, paradoxical tension: the collision of painfully austere existential themes with an almost hallucinatory richness of imagination. This rapturous clash, filtered through the lens of a…
A Collision of Hearts and History: Cyril Aris’s A Sad and Beautiful World Explores Love Amidst Lebanon’s Perennial Conflict
In the cinematic landscape, few locales are as fraught with the intersection of beauty and trauma as Lebanon. It is a nation where the specter of civil unrest has lingered for over half a century, transforming the mundane into the miraculous and the…
The Beautiful Rot: Inside the Unsettling World of Karim Aïnouz’s ‘Rosebush Pruning’
Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. Mubi releases "Rosebush Pruning" in select theaters starting Friday, July 24. In the landscape of contemporary cinema, few directors possess the visual…
The Aestheticization of Atrocity: Analyzing Ivan Ostrochovský’s ‘Only Beautiful Things to Look At’ and the Legacy of Roma Sterilization
The cinematic landscape of Central Europe has often grappled with the ghosts of its communist past, but few subjects remain as raw or as systematically obscured as the state-sponsored sterilization of Roma women. In his latest feature, "Only…
