“I don’t give a shit about politics or elections” screams Yeon-hong (Son Ye-jin) at her husband, Jong-chan (Kim Joo-hyuk), near the halfway point of The Truth…
“Life is others” writes the central character of The Long Excuse, Sachio (Masahiro Motoki), near the end of the film. And How Sachio goes from being…
In Blood of Youth, a convoluted tale of revenge by Chinese director Yang Shupeng, a young man (Yan Haoqi) suffers a traumatic injury defending a…
Reconfiguring a classic pinku film as a somewhat more tasteful modern-day indie melodrama seems like a terrible idea, and guess what, it is. Kazuya Shiraichi’s…
The high-stakes world of standardized testing may sound like a punchline, but that’s essentially the setup to Nattawut Poonpiriya’s NYAFF-opening Bad Genius. The film follows Lynn (Chutimon…
A fanciful period piece set just after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Chen Yu-Hsun’s The Village of No Return may have an ominous sounding English…
#8: It Comes at Night Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: On this week’s episode we head to the movie theater and check…
In her promising first feature, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour forewent the feminist messaging her film’s title might…
Utterly adventurous, João Pedro Rodrigues’s dizzying and highly personal The Ornithologist is loosely based on the life of St. Anthony of Padua and unfolds in the…
#7: High Tension Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: On this week’s episode we delve into 2005’s High Tension, an extreme horror flick from…
#6: People Like Us Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: As the latest version of The Mummy lurches its way into theaters, we take…
An auteurist invention of the highest order, Matías Piñeiro’s ongoing “Shakespeare series” is the ideal platform to showcase the Argentinean director’s enticing and increasingly unique…
2017—so far at least—hasn’t been spectacular. In between the deaths of beloved auteurs like Jonathan Demme and Seijun Suzuki, you had 25 beating Lemonade at…
Recalling the softer screwballs of the 1930s—or, more specifically, modern imitations of those classics—This Is Not What I Expected is essentially You’ve Got Mail—except with the two…
China retrofit its communism with capitalism, so why shouldn’t it augment an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-indebted premise with the procedural plot points of Minority Report?…
Starting out as a bit of meta-commentary on a notorious massacre, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark quickly and deliberately questions its own point of…
Though Terence Davies was absent from the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2015, his Emily Dickinson film A Quiet Passion makes its appearance this year…
Alan Mak and Felix Chong, two-thirds of the team behind the very good Infernal Affairs series and the prime movers of the mediocre-at-best Overheard trilogy, team up again for Extraordinary Mission, a…
Give Nacho Vigalondo’s latest points for being consistently unpredictable: it’s a monster movie, in a sense, but the monsters turn out to be analogous for its…
“Everything disgusts me,” exclaims dying King Louis XIV (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The most disgusting thing present? The repulsive nature of aristocracy, laid out in full view…
“I hope we’ll have fun and party, that’s why I’m here!” This is what Lilly (Laure Calamy) tells an excited crowd of French retreaters in The…