World cinema has come a long way in the last two decades when it comes to queer representation in film. Yet despite the growing amount…
Ding (Fan Wei) is the director of a farm during the heyday of the second Sino-Japanese war. He’s been tasked by a group of shareholders…
Set on the Sino-Burmese border, Peng Fei Song’s second feature, The Taste of Rice Flower, tells the story of Ye Nan (Ying Ze), a young…
Yang Li-chou’s documentary Father is about Chen Hsi-huang, an octogenarian master of the budaixi Taiwanese hand puppetry. He is the student, and oldest son, of…
YouTube has made it easier than ever to disseminate the solipsistic musings of just about anybody — as we all have a tendency to willingly…
Cai Chengjie’s feminist fable The Widowed Witch plays-out across a succession of rural, wintry landscapes, through which travels Erhao (Tian Tian), a thrice-widowed woman who’s…
Set toward the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, Bangzi Melody presents the life of a small village as its inhabitants go about the tasks…
The inaugural CineCina — officially, New York’s only Chinese cinema-focused film festival — wrapped about a week ago. Featured in this report are just some…
Eli Roth has long thrived in a culture that does not seem to understand, nor like, him. This isn’t to say that he’s lacked success…
While Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films continued to grow a stronger and stronger reputation among the most vulgar of auterists, another series — of Japanese…
It’s really not clear why Oscar-winning actress Brie Larson would want to cash-in her awards clout on a hopelessly muddled slog like Unicorn Store. Filmed ages…
The narrative framework of Helena Wittmann’s Drift revolves around two women, each going their own separate ways after spending some time together in northern Germany. One of the…
To say that Polkadot Stingray rose to fame overnight might be a bit dramatic — but not too far off. The group only formed in…
An interest in outer space has informed both the visual aesthetic and music of Dempagumi.inc over the past year. While the group first appeared as…
Austrian composer Christian Fennesz’s glitchy compositions operate like a more understated Rube Goldberg machine: every seemingly insignificant sound effect or pronounced use of reverb ultimately…
As a title, Hell Like Heaven serves to explain the clashing contradictions that bring about the joys in The Peggies’ music. The Japanese trio’s buzzing,…
The Higher Brothers’ 2017 album Black Cab is one of the most confident debuts in recent memory, rap or otherwise. On that project, the Brothers…
Chinese cinema is now deep into its latest movement, its 8th Wave. But this moment is a conflicted one, as intensely contradictory as Chinese existence itself —…
Relaxer sticks to a grim formalist gimmick that exhausts its visual ideas by about the halfway mark, leaving director Joel Potrykus to indulge in the…
Khalik Allah’s new essayistic documentary Black Mother is a deeply moving work of humanistic empathy, intertwining the personal and the political into an aesthetic that attempts…
The foggy shores of Australia’s Christmas Island become a crossroad for migrants of both the human and animal variety in Gabrielle Brady’s haunted and moody…