Jacques Rivette proved some decades ago that it’s possible to conjure a Langian cinema without Langian means, to describe the vast, malevolent architecture of modernity with little more than an empty stage, a shabby apartment, and a map of Paris annotated by a particularly…
Sibyl is a film that feels richer at the margins than at the center, largely by design and to its credit. Victoria, Justine Triet’s last film, opens with Virginie Efira curled up on a couch asking her therapist where, exactly, her life became unstuck. Efira occupies…
I think it’s safe to say that Nobuhiko Obayashi no longer requires an introduction. For that we owe the Japan Cuts team a debt of gratitude. The Obayashi retrospective they programmed back in 2015, the first of its kind in the United States, planted…
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 beginning, this director’s camera has reserved for this actor’s body its tenderest embraces, its lustiest looks, its cruelest…
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 the seven years since, he’s shown himself to be a rather active retiree, signing his name to no fewer…
“For a talking cinema”: that’s the title that a young Maurice Scherer, not yet christened Eric Rohmer, selected for his signature polemic, and the apparent aim of the current Cristi Puiu project. The Romanian New Wave stalwart certainly wouldn’t object to the implied comparison.…
The instinct to gather ’round a fire and share stories is as ancient as human urges get. The impulse to make movies in which the primary action unfolds via long-winded speeches delivered to offscreen flames—preferably in long, unremarkable fixed takes—is a more recent anthropological…
Elia Suleiman: actor, director, “citizen of the world.” It Must Be Heaven follows Suleiman as he journeys from his native Palestine to Paris, and then to New York, using his artistic status as a passport and a platform from which to broadcast empty truisms about the…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film is set — and which is indeed new territory, geographically speaking — but to this border zone openly contested by opposing modes, genres, and moods. To the Ends of the Earth…
Set in the Osaka slum of the title, The Kamagasaki Cauldron War’s very existence testifies to its politics: it defies a local ordinance that deems the neglected neighborhood literally unnameable. It also stands — along with former Japan Cuts comrades Sanchu Uprising and Hanagatami…
