An aesthetic tour-de-force if also an empty and unfailingly derivative one, actor Brady Corbet’s directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader, is based on a Jean-Paul Sartre short story,…
Sourcing material from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr certainly lends Yoshifumi Tsubota’s second film a certain pedigree—and indeed, The Shell Collector looks as if it may…
Kako: My Sullen Past is a film that tells you life is boring. Even with the numerous odd events taking place, our titular character (Fumi Nikaido)…
Set in low-income housing and offering glimpses into the hardships of the working class—the central couple’s son was killed by an overworked truck driver—Junji Sakamoto’s…
“Filmmaking is a battle we can’t lose,” says a possible investor to director Tetsuo (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) in Lowlife Love. If that’s the case, then call…
A film about the love affair between an anthropomorphized goldfish (Fumi Nikaidô) and an aging writer (Ren Ôshugi), Gakuryû Ishii’s Bitter Honey is less surprising…
Love in the Buff screenwriter Luk Yee-sum aspires to normalize the conversation around young, female sexuality through a recognition that, as with any other interaction, the healthiest…
Mr. Six is a Chinese fusion of John Wick and Taken that’s also director Guan Hu and star Feng Xiaogang’s Gran Torino: Spurred on by the abduction of his son and the…
Martial-artist and filmmaker Sammo Hung, responsible for some of the greatest films in the genre’s history (Eastern Condors, Pedicab Driver, Encounters of the Spooky Kind,…
Ryan Coogler’s Rocky spin-off Creed begins, evocatively, in a juvenile corrections facility. A handsomely framed shot depicts a line of African-American boys filing through a…
The biggest surprise of Brooklyn is how determinedly sweet it remains to the end, its period vibrancy bordering on the genteel. In navigating the push-pull narrative of Eilis…
Combining what some have called his propensity for “arthouse miserablism” in films like Babel or Biutiful with a newfound fetish for conspicuous formal audacity (see…
Period homages or allusions to Hollywood’s past can be diminished without a new perspective to contextualize them. This is to say, reviving a given style can be limiting without some…
Pinastri, a scientific term given to a specific moth family, is the safe word for S&M lovers Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna),…
Blackhat opens with a CG-animated representation of a block of data infiltrating a computer network. A tiny glowing grid sliding along a superconducting surface with…
In a season where all films are trying too hard to either be award winners or box office cash cows — or both — Darren…
But let’s not fool ourselves into believing that the original TRON was ever anything more than a curious novelty with some then-groundbreaking special effects. The story…
There’s a scene about halfway through Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s tepid The Tourist during which an Italian policeman appears to doubt Johnny Depp’s mistaken identity…
Early critical response to Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit, a faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’s western novel, has been mostly positive, yet many mask…
Boxing is a sport dependent on mental strategy, despite what its surface-level brutality suggests. In The Fighter, the physically tough but emotionally stricken welterweight boxer…
With Vengeance, Johnnie To once again makes art of action. In a stylish Hong Kong thriller held captive by the stoic auspices of French king-of-cool…