Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home for Asian action…
It’s not much of a surprise to discover that John Denver Trending is the feature debut of writer-director Arden Rod Condez. Given the opportunity to…
New Vietnamese film Rom has garnered comparisons to both Run Lola Run and Slumdog Millionaire, though it shares neither the gimmicky structure of either nor…
Unleashed & Geran Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home…
It would be easy to write off the dark comedy I predatori (The Predators, in English) as an exercise in nihilism. The corpse of Friedrich…
Mainstream Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has demonstrated its allure among filmmakers, and it’s easy to understand…
Cuties is an impressive, complex coming-of-age narrative and a profound refutation of the nonsensical controversy that has arisen around it. The hysteria surrounding Maïmouna Doucouré’s…
From an aesthetic standpoint, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary or ambitious about Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. It’s a work that could just as easily function as…
Victim(s), the debut feature from Layla Zhuqing Ji, is the latest in a long line of cautionary tales in which it is made abundantly clear…
Sibyl is a film that feels richer at the margins than at the center, largely by design and to its credit. Victoria, Justine Triet’s last film, opens…
Beasts Clawing at Straws The new Korean crime thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws is a derivative, charmless bit of Tarantino-aping nonsense, a convoluted mess so…
Mulan fails as action spectacle and lazily cribs from the vast cinematic legacy it so loosely approximates. After such massive financial successes as Beauty and the…
Swanberg’s latest represents a savvy and mature return to his early-career mode of filmmaking. Fifteen years after his first feature, Joe Swanberg is back where…
Modern-day Cuba, as documented in Hubert Sauper’s latest foray into political ethnography, is a third-world island marked distinctly by the stamp of first-world capitalism. Co-existing…
Undergods is a crypto-anthology film that gradually morphs into a distaff network narrative, one of those everyone-is-connected type movies that were all the rage about…
With Sanzaru, writer/director Xia Magnus details both the grueling daily trials of elder care and the immigrant experience with the patient, observant eye of a…
The works of Lloyd Kaufman, founder and director of Troma Films, have always been about breaking the boundaries of what can be shown and told in…
Undergods Undergods is a crypto-anthology film that gradually morphs into a distaff network narrative, one of those everyone-is-connected type movies that were all the rage…
For all of Tenet’s ostensible narrative novelty and talk of the future, it is, in the end, a dismayingly familiar experience. It makes some degree…
Coastal Elites is a tone-deaf and formally lazy film that ignores issues of substance in favor of a facile call for civility. Anyone concerned that the…
Nomad is a passionate and heartfelt work, but Herzog’s foregrounded presence sometimes distracts from film’s more mystical ambitions. In January 1989, the legendary British adventurer, writer,…