It takes a while in “Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day” to reach Barren Island, a notorious penal colony in the former Yugoslavia where no cells were necessary and armed guards counted on the sea to keep those incarcerated in line. However, a prison without bars reveals itself early on in writer-director Ivona Juka’s stark and occasionally […]

There is a bitter irony at the heart of Abdulaziz Alshlahei’s dynamic third feature “Hobal,” which follows a family that has long sought safety in the desert, led by Liyam (Ibrahim Al-Hasawi), a patriarch carrying on a Bedouin tradition by living at a remove from civilization. While the nomadic clan has picked up and moved […]

There’s an unexpected implication when Antonella Sudasassi Furniss exposes the parameters of her film set at the start of “Memories of a Burning Body,” following lead Sol Carabello into one room to have her makeup done and a gaffer in another arranging the lights for a scene. It isn’t to accept the artifice of the […]