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The set of The Cathedral. Photo by Michael Kohlbrenner.One of American cinema’s most singular voices, Ricky D’Ambrose has charted a methodical course from short to feature-length filmmaking over the course of a decade. No mere dry-runs, the New York-born director’s shorts are self-contained marvels of narrative and stylistic ingenuity—brief bursts of urban fiction that veritably overflow with visual, aural, and linguistic information. So while in that sense, a shift to features was inevitable—“a feature was always the end goal,” D’Ambrose told me in a recent Zoom call—the shorts provided a key foundation for what was to come. “I think the shorts allowed me to experiment with a certain way of making films,” he said. “Ultimately, it was a way for me to work through some of the ideas I had been carrying around in my head.” But unlike other filmmakers that might forsake...