Moon Guo Barker in Ben Rivers’s Mare’s Nest (2025) Over the weekend, Ben Rivers was in Los Angeles for screenings of a trilogy of short films that inform his new visual novel, Urthworks. Working with sci-fi author Mark von Schlegell, Rivers conjures possible future states of our planet in three stages following an environmental collapse. Tonight, Rivers will be back at 2220 Arts + Archives to present Bogancloch (2024), a contemplative portrait of Scottish recluse Jake Williams.

Rivers will then head to New York later this week as Bogancloch and four earlier films he’s made with Williams screen at Anthology Film Archives. He’ll also take part in Q&As on Thursday and Friday as the New York Film Festival presents his latest feature, Mare’s Nest, as the Centerpiece presentation of its Currents program.

“There is a fragility to his films—shot on celluloid and hand-processed—that can make them like handling ancient relics, works that threaten to break down as you watch,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage. “But that perishability accounts for their extraordinary vitality.” Mare’s Nest is set in a world in which all the adults have disappeared. Where to or why is never mentioned. Among the freely wandering children is nine-year-old Moon (Moon Guo Barker), and the film’s eight chapters are each given over to one of her encounters.

For Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, one standout of the eight is “a textually faithful filming” of Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word for Snow. “DeLillo’s anti-naturalistic dialogue is a challenge for actors on the rare occasions they get to tackle it; having uncomprehending but nonetheless very earnest children reciting it at a diligent clip is, weirdly, just right, removing the stentorian quality and leaving us to contemplate precisely sculpted language in relief.”

“Mare’s Nest is defined by its fragmentation,” writes Martin Kudláč at ScreenAnarchy. “It was shot in intervals over months and years, across different terrains and with varying film stocks, resulting in shifting visual registers. Some sequences are static and observational, others are stylized, even theatrical. Saturated colors cede to monochrome, natural light to artificial glow. A handheld camera tracks Moon as she walks; elsewhere, tableaux emerge in locked frames. Rather than seek continuity, Rivers embraces the disjuncture, reflecting the piecemeal nature of the film’s production and the episodic rhythm of childhood itself, less a linear arc than a series of perceptual thresholds.”

Another Currents highlight, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, screens once more this evening before heading to festivals in London,Ghent, and Chicago. Irakli (David Koberidze, the director’s father) roams rural Georgia in search of his missing daughter. He’s accompanied by one of her closest friends, Levan (Otar Nijaradze), who is also one of a cluster of characters in Dry Leaf who happen to be invisible. They’re there, interacting; we simply can’t see them.

“Koberidze opens with a montage of cats, foot traffic, street dogs twitching in their sleep, statues and trees casting long shadows across buildings,” writes Jessica Kiang in Variety. “It’s only a couple of minutes long but when it ends—on what is, irrefutably, a dry leaf—you may find your brain already starting to reformat its cinematic notions of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly.’ In almost any other context, the mushy, bitmapped backgrounds and granulated edges (rendered by a Sony Ericsson phone that was discontinued in 2011) would look repellent, like mistakes. Here, as accompanied by a stretch of a fantastic score (by Koberidze’s brother Giorgi) that sounds like villains chasing damsels in a silent-movie caper, they look romantic, like mysteries.”

“Koberidze respects codes like shot/reverse shot,” notes Arta Barzanji at Ultra Dogme. “He stages over-the-shoulder conversations and orients us with familiar angles. But seen through the stubborn grain of a low-resolution phone camera, these ‘invisible’ conventions become newly visible. The standard frame starts to feel less like neutral delivery and more like a decision with stakes. This is estrangement by association: alter one parameter (resolution) and you wobble others (framing, cutting, rhythm), reminding us that stylistic elements never operate in isolation.”

“While lacking the surprising diversions and slender but charming fabular storytelling of his previous feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021),” writes MUBI’s Daniel Kasman, “the golden-hued, chill-vibed, and unpretentious Dry Leaf confirms Koberidze as an essential artist making a different, and peculiarly special, kind of feel-good movie.”

In End of the Century (2019), New York–based Argentine filmmaker and fashion designer Lucio Castro’s first feature, two men hook up while holidaying in Barcelona and discover that they aren’t strangers after all. “Castro has created an eighty-minute wrestle with specifically gay twenty-first-century anxieties that feels properly epic,” wrote Reverse Shot coeditor Michael Koresky.

Castro’s psychological drama After This Death premiered in Berlin in February—reviews were mixed—and was quickly followed in May by a third feature, Drunken Noodles, “surely the hottest title in this year’s ACID lineup,” as Rory O’Connor put it in a dispatch from Cannes to the Film Stage. It’s a “sultry and strangely calming film, eighty-two minutes of late-night hookups and late-season ennui that passes like a summer breeze.”

“The unfussed, soft-spoken air of lead actor Laith Khalifeh very much sets the tempo for Drunken Noodles, much of which unfolds in his company alone,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety. “As Adnan, an art student spending the summer cat-sitting for a wealthy uncle in New York City, he’s impassive and inquisitive in equal measure. With his on-trend mustache and just-oversized-enough wardrobe, he looks the part of a practiced urban hipster, perfectly accessorized with a job as an intern at a hole-in-the-wall Williamsburg gallery—but there’s a faintly anxious naiveté to him that draws in other men, of various ages and types, over the course of three chapters sequenced in reverse chronological order.”

Writing for the Art Newspaper, Mark Asch notes that Castro is “interested in the apps that foster a modular, frictionless urban existence, and what types of desire they do and do not satiate. In Drunken Noodles, there is a sharp cut from Adnan giving five stars to an Uber Eats courier to Adnan finishing a Grindr rendezvous. Like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s, Castro’s films are becalmed—New York feels lazy and empty, all dappled summer light and birdsong, and he favors understated, deliberate performances—but the placidity conceals an ache that is revealed when coincidence and contrivance roil the surface of the narrative.”

Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.