Following a standout 2023 edition, where critically acclaimed films like India Donaldson’s Good One premiered at Sundance and Cannes, and Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch swept three major awards in Venice, the U.S. in Progress team in Wrocław continues to elevate American indie cinema on the global stage. The fourteenth edition of the U.S. in Progress co-production forum will take place from November 7-9, 2024, as part of the fifteenth American Film Festival in Wrocław, Poland. Among the eight selected projects are new works by filmmakers such as Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please), Pete Ohs (Jethica), and Mark Webber (The Place of No Words), who will profile their projects alongside films from emerging first-time directors including Under the Lights by Miles Levin with the backing of the Vanishing Angle folks.… Read the rest
Although it will invariably be confused with the 2014 Stephen Hawking biopic, Timm Kröger’s fascinating sophomore feature The Universal Theory (Die Theorie Von Allem) blends modern cinema’s excessive obsession with the notion of the multiverse into a gloomy, sci-fi neo noir. It’s also a fatalistic, overcast love story, reminiscent of everything from Solaris (1972) to Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime Je T’aime (1968), utilizing contemporary fascinations folded into vintage aesthetics. In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), Kröger’s film arrives as if from some fortuitous concentric time loop to revel in the ripple effects of the atomic bomb.… 
While he’s one of the greatest film directors of all time, mostly thanks to a handful of films he delivered during the 1970s New American Cinema movement, 
To borrow a succinct phrase from Beyonce, ‘pretty hurts,’ a sentiment quivering through Coraline Fargeat’s morbidly entertaining sophomore feature, The Substance. Its simplistic title eventually reveals itself to be a vicious bit of irony, considering it refers to a magical titular potion which seems fashioned for those who are actually lacking substance, their worth defined solely by the superficiality of youth and beauty. Los Angeles turns out to be ground zero for this unique riff on Death Becomes Her (1992), plus a formidable array of other cult titles in what is essentially a ‘be careful what you wish for’ moral fable.…