Lewis Klahr’s latest example of collage cinema is his most explicitly political, and perhaps creative, yet. Over several decades of consistent output, collage artist Lewis…
Yourself and Yours is a surreal, playful, and sometimes brilliant puzzle of a film from director Hong Sang-soo. In Yourself and Yours, we find Hong…
The director’s latest work is built on quiet moments of spiritual and professional reflection, a Fellini-esque inward gaze at the artist and his art. Originally…
At the crossroads of about a half-dozen genres and borrowing the best that each has to offer, there’s no other movie quite like Ridley Scott’s…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or…
To understand the ostensible intent of Jon Stewart’s latest film, Irresistible, it’s best to begin at the end: “Money lived happily ever after…reveling in its…
Olivier Assayas produced a stunningly idiosyncratic series of works in the 2010s, even by his typically eclectic standards. From the mammoth Carlos to the autobiographical Something in…
There’s a willful naivete many cinephiles employ when attempting to wax poetics about “the theater-going experience,” one that blatantly ignores sociopolitical and economic dimensions in…
It has become increasingly evident that 2009 was a major turning point in Tsai Ming-liang’s artistic development: Madame Butterfly marked his first, decisive shift to…
In considering the artistic decay posed within the persisting practice of archetypal expository documentary, Your Face represents a confrontation with history and convention, here mapped…
Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng have one of the strangest relationships in movies. For dedicated Tsai (and Lee) fans, that goes almost without saying. From…
The Journey to the West was perhaps the defining story of Chinese language film in the 2010s. Like stories of the Shaolin Temple or folk…
Were one to walk the streets of Taipei, ride its elevated MRT lines, and pass by the imposing structure of the Taipei 101 and the…
In 2013, around the time that Stray Dogs had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Tsai Ming-liang announced his retirement from filmmaking. In…
It’s perhaps presumptuous, a little reductive even, to speak of an artist’s filmography as movements or periods, particularly when they are still making new, vital…
Considering the breadth and consistency of Tsai Ming-liang’s filmography, it’s initially hard to regard the short Madame Butterfly as much more than a curious aberration.…
Judd Apatow has built and padded his filmography on a basic principle: construct vehicles for comic actors in the early days of their ascending stardom…
Spike Lee’s newest joint, Da 5 Bloods, makes perfectly clear its influences when, within the first five minutes, the camera pans out from a giant…
Given his relative renown amongst a certain type of adventurous, festival-savvy cinephile, interviews with Tsai Ming-liang tend to focus on either the ‘slowness’ of his…
Speaking in 2008 of what was then his most recent feature, 2006’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang said: “I did not want…
Tsai Ming-liang’s cinema is primarily concerned with naifs and innocents, usually confronted with complex existential conditions, and with The Wayward Cloud (and arguably 2009’s Face,…