Very loosely inspired by a colorful real-life incident that sadly didn’t end well for the animal in question, Cocaine Bear is a period horror-comedy that…
In This Issue: FEATURES: Berlin International Film Festival: Samsara (Lois Patiño) by Ryan Akler-Bishop // Inside (Vasilis Katsoupis) by Ryan Akler-Bishop // Bad Living /…
It’s been ten years since Kelela’s debut mixtape, Cut 4 Me, earned rave reviews She’s since produced a semi-regular output, with her first proper LP,…
In Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany proposes that “we need images of tomorrow, and our people need them more than most.” Queer life, as it were,…
“Art is for keeps,” the protagonist of Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside proclaims, just shortly before finding himself condemned to an art-laden torture chamber. Played by Willem…
If the camera produces an impression of a visualizable and material reality, how can the apparatus of cinema stand in for an abstract and intangible…
Premiering in Berlinale Forum, a space reserved for “test[ing] the boundaries of convention,” Yoo Heong-jun’s Regardless of Us will inevitably elicit comparisons with the works…
Images fade in and out, they flicker and repeat as metallic crashing and analog distortion echo from a distance. Lei Lei’s fragmentary short, That Day,…
In João Canijo’s Berlinale competition film Bad Living, long shots are composed so precisely that their motivations frequently don’t become clear for minutes — often…
In This Issue: FEATURES: A Synthesis of Different Ideas: An Interview with Lois Patiño by Ryan Akler-Bishop FILM REVIEWS: Mad Fate (Soi Cheang) by Ryan…
Lois Patiño began his career making landscape films—a cycle of shorts that reframe the relationship between geographic space and spectatorship. Over the past decade, his…
Since moving from 16mm to digital nearly fifteen years ago, James Benning’s films have become more and more stringent, foregoing surface incident in favor of…
Subtlety isn’t Singaporean cinema’s strong suit, as year after year of mainstream slop, indie darlings, and enfant terrible flops (having largely been banned back home)…
The idea that cinema is dying, or perhaps already died, is certainly popular in a time when digital spectacle has all but consumed any other…
A young woman from Tokyo finds herself in a strange town. In the beginning, she is looking for a tourist site, the ruins of an…
“I have a secret life. You’re looking at me but what you see is not what I am.” Who was Donna Summer? This is the…
The first feature from Chinese filmmaker Wu Lang, Absence shares a title and cast with the director’s second short film, which played at Cannes in…
There is little build-up to the opening of Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s latest thriller, #Manhole. Within the first five minutes, unfortunate salesman Shunsuke Kawamura (Yûto Nakajima) awakes…
If one thing can be said for the award-winning, box office-safe, well-worn road of the biopic, it’s that with the volume of films being made,…
In an era when any slob with a next-day delivery synth can create bleep-bloops in their bedroom and go viral overnight, the musical and technological…
Despite boasting a filmography mostly known for its unorthodox approximations to period detail and the formal subversions that come with it, the defining characteristic of…