In this dispatch: Kinki, Cold War…
Beyond that upper tier of ubiquitous classics like Ring, Ju-On, Audition, and Pulse, Kōji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse has cemented itself as a “you’ve gotta…
Released in 2012, Leung Lok-man & Sunny Luk Kim-Ching’s Cold War became a gargantuan commercial smash and critical success, breaking domestic box office records and…
It’s the summer of 1994, and a P.I. by the name of Yonemoto (Jiro Sato) has been found brutally beaten and stabbed to death in…
Chinese-Canadian writer-director Xiaodan He’s film Montreal, My Beautiful is a thoughtful, understated independent film with an ace up its sleeve: the film’s protagonist is played…
Nicolas Winding Refn resists containment. His earliest films (the Pusher [1996-2005] trilogy and Bleeder [1999]) channel a forceful neo-realist intensity, while his subsequent works venture…
Through a career of empathetic, patient character studies, Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda has developed many running fascinations. Gaps in families, how we fill those, and…
If you have ever had a chance to see Hadestown live, you won’t wonder at its success, running on Broadway for seven years now despite…
Billionaires are a funny breed. A hardworking and often altruistic bunch, they nevertheless carry the scarlet letter of corruption wherever they go: they may do…
The actor Alan Ritchson is a little bit of an anomaly as far as modern leading men go. Best known for playing the title role…
Premiering all the way back during 2024’s festival season, Lorena Alvarado’s Lost Chapters has been a film I’d been looking forward to for quite some…
Based on its tepid reception in Cannes earlier this year, one might reasonably expect Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new film Sheep in the Box to be a…
In this dispatch: Turgaud…
Though Western cinephiles are likely most familiar with Herman Yau through the grisly Category III shockers he made with Anthony Wong (Taxi Hunter, The Untold…
At the small airport in Karatas, Bek (Berik Aitzhanov) arrives dressed for another climate. Greasy hair hangs around his untrimmed beard, and a heavy fur…
One of the better moments in Park Joon-ho’s debut feature, 3670, is its first. The young, timid Cheol-jun (Cho Yoo-hyun) climaxes during a sexual encounter…
There’s an old axiom about how you can’t manufacture a cult favorite, and instead the audience has to find it and organically turn it into…
Fujiko (Yuki Katayama) sells insurance to a cook by making her life part of the policy. She looks at her prospective client, adopts a hangdog…
The patient sensibilities of Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing wouldn’t normally suggest a paranoid political thriller. And yet, his debut feature, with long takes evoking…
No Wave legend Beth B’s latest project, Glowing, is something like a short story cycle. Beth B previously made eight short works about friends and…
The castles of Ludwig II seem to resound with that Wagnerian mystery: here time becomes space. They seem to distend from some turreted past; a…