A major fear factor in horror stems from isolation, and its pervasive influence extends to both claustrophobic and agoraphobic conditions. Whether confined within a box…
“I shall. For it is a happy tale.” So begins the lurid odyssey of flesh reformed and soul remade, a marionette reanimated by its creator…
To view history through the lens of the present frequently engenders all kinds of catharsis, from the moral smugness of the studio biopic to the…
Between the birth of the civil rights movement and the present dearth of ideological nuance, no small credit should be given to the former for…
Some types of horror are cosmic; others cautionary. In our day and age, when productions often come with a press kit full of themes, it’s…
In a small village in Jharkhand, east India prowls a tiger; this tiger is misogyny, and its fellow tigers constitute the broader institutions of patriarchy.…
Writing in 1924, the rhetorician and literary critic I.A. Richards remarked, in his Principles of Literary Criticism, on the “futility of all argumentation that precedes…
Film is a collection of stills, yet rarely is film still; in the empire of the moving image, action and reaction reign supreme. But action…
The titular expression of Chong Keat Aun’s sophomore feature, Snow in Midsummer, has a political signification beyond its outwardly meteorological imagery. In Guan Hanqing’s The…
Though they lived a millennium and a half apart, Aristotle and Dante Alighieri shared a conception of love that gave rise to most of humanity’s…
For a work whose subject matter purports to straddle the lofty and permanent, its subject appears remarkably contingent. The Eternal Memory, Maite Alberdi’s latest documentary…
The age of streaming is the age of accelerated attention — attention caught, swept away, and crystallized in breathless signification. Breathless, because what underlines this…
No doubt this has been said elsewhere already, but the most effective horror traffics in an unreality that’s very much tethered to our real world.…
Clocking in at a breezy 73 minutes, Kokomo City — which bagged audience awards at both the Sundance and Berlin film festivals — proves a…
Of the three leads in They Cloned Tyrone, Juel Taylor’s wild conspiracy caper, not one is actually named Tyrone. It’s a slight detail that quickly…
For the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the world comprised a single substance, and that substance was God. “Except God,” he wrote in the treatise Ethics,…
The burgeoning demand for cinematic “relevance” today comes with several implicit assumptions as to what that relevance entails. For starters, there’s a certain complementary relationship…
A deceptive airiness courses through No Love Lost, the sophomore feature from Erwan Le Duc — which follows his equally quaint and whimsical The Bare…
Body doubles and deception have always been the fertile staples of romantic comedy — look no further than Shakespeare, who imbued such courtly antics with…
One of the biggest pitfalls of depicting and representing trauma arrives precisely and most insidiously in what appears to be its greatest strength: by grafting…
The premise is hit-or-miss: imagine a circus troupe in the vein of the Fantastic Four, but situated smack in the middle of Nazi-infested Rome, witnesses…