FILMS from AFAR

In a world engineered for distraction, living with intention isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s resistance. Is your Instagram feed all Bridgerton, all the time? Well, of course it is. The algorithms have made it so. Social media companies profit off their “free” platforms by making us the product. Our attention is their currency. The more we engage with their content—the longer we scroll, the faster we click, the more rabbit holes we dive down—the more they earn. Our tech-necks a

“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.” The Jean Renoir quote captures the way many auteurs, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar included, seem to chip away at the same ideas and themes over and over again. His entertaining new melodrama, Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), is clearly carved from the same marble as his other globally acclaimed works. Add to this the irony that celebrity can reduce a person’s physical world at the

Tangier-born writer-actor-director Maryam Touzani says that with her new film Calle Málaga, she wanted to “celebrate the beauty of aging and the freedom that can come with aging.” The story turns on a 70-something woman, played by Spanish veteran Carmen Maura, who insists on remaining in her home in Tangier—against all odds. In doing so, she remakes her life, finds new love and reinforces her connections with her Moroccan roots, the place where she was born and raised as part

Informative, humanizing, and at moments downright scary, this eye-opening documentary is sure to make waves. Interviewees in The Plastic Detox ask how it’s possible that industrial companies have been allowed to make such prevalent products without knowing or addressing the potential and proven harms. Viewers will want to know the same after this wake-up call, which explores the correlations between plastic chemical exposure and a huge range of illnesses, defects, and healt

This tragic, strange, beautifully filmed, hypnotic movie is both hard to watch and tough to take your eyes off. Sir ā t was a finalist for best international film and best sound design Oscars. That latter nomination recognizes the sensory experience of the film, which sets striking frames of the desert to the pulsating techno beats and haunting strains of rave music. The technical work on display from the sound team, cinematographer Mauro Herce, director Laxe, who co-wrote th

This is a sensitive piece of filmmaking with insights into the band's origins as well as how its members today, once head-banging punk rockers, now feel about their lives and legacies. The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is also a film about the wild and creative milieu of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. The use of a digitally engineered voice for Hillel, the beloved bandmate who died of a drug overdose in 1988, could raise eyebrows. But it comes ac