It might be a little premature to have the “late style” conversation with regard to the highly prolific Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who turns 69 in July.…
Director Isao Yukisada is something of a chameleon. Having gotten his start as an assistant director for Shunji Iwai, with whom he worked on five…
The first idea that can be discarded with regard to Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, the acclaimed 1985 film centered on the…
There was a noticeable shift in American genre filmmaking as the New Hollywood-dominated 1970s faded and gave way to the more cynical zeitgeist of the…
Director Mikio Naruse never garnered the acclaim of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Akira Kurosawa. The absence of a clearly legible “minimalism” (a reductive descriptor…
“What happened is true. Now the motion picture that’s just as real.” The theatrical release poster for Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror milestone lured audiences with…
Before anything else, before any talk of its “uneven narrative” (per the otherwise complimentary Rotten Tomatoes critic’s consensus), it’s worth considering the contours of Francis…
Girl meets boy. Boy meets girl. Love blossoms. Reality sets in. The pandemic hits. They grow apart while remaining tethered to each other in explicable,…
Before throwing us into the story proper, JT Mollner’s Strange Darling informs us that it was “shot entirely on 35mm film.” It’s a strange inclusion,…
The first obvious parallel to Tilman Singer’s horror-thriller Cuckoo is The Shining. A family — Luis (Marton Csokas), the patriarch, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), his teenage…
There appears to be strange, insidious brand of conservatism permeating the culture. Far removed from Silicon Valley-funded reactionary wannabe bohemians, whose broader cultural impact is…
In her 2019 memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin grapples with the aftermath of a near-fatal bear attack in the…
“The physical world relies on a much more complex universe. Like fish who cannot see the water they are in, we are immersed in something…
It’s an awkward phase, that post-graduation purgatory where possibilities seem endless, endlessly limited, or both — or so I’m told, I never went to college…
Given the baffling and total absence of any marketing from Netflix, the fact that cult movie mainstay Takashi Miike made his return to the genre…
If the recurring discourse cycles of online spaces, namely on Twitter, are to be believed, we are in for some seriously prudish times. Every so…
Unfortunately, the current cinema landscape doesn’t allow for many straightforward genre films to slip through the cracks. Most that do are bogged down by political…
A tale of desperation and shared fates, of people hanging on to a life that is slipping away from them: two women, Elsa Gray (Sonya…
Daishi Matsunaga’s gay romantic drama, Egoist, based on Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, follows Kōsuke Saitō (Ryohei Suzuki), a gay fashion magazine…
Where have all the taboo romances gone? Admittedly, the trailer for Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl didn’t inspire much hope for their return, particularly since…
Time was, you could go see a slasher movie where the people making it seemed most concerned with providing gnarly kills, suspense, and perhaps a…