Perhaps we’ve been sold an overly literal version of heaven when we jump at the chance to live forever. While theologians balk at how transactional…
Melancholy, that inexplicable feeling of pensiveness, constitutes the centerpiece of memory, at least when memory divulges itself to its owner and defers all fantasies of…
“People are cheap, water is expensive.” So says Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the mysterious and curiously educated drifter who stumbles into Ali’s (Ekin Koç) withered…
In the television series Dexter, our eponymous antagonist finds himself gifted, or cursed, with an insatiable urge to kill. Although he grows up under the…
Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against…
Plenty of films have traversed the anxieties of separation and national identity, specifically the question of what happens when a nation breaks up from within,…
Following the critical success of 2018’s The Wolf House, directoral duo Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña have returned with The Hyperboreans, a papier-mâché melange of…
There is a futility to championing ideas which, once derided, have now been vindicated by the zeitgeist, in the same way that the idea of…
Few things are capable of riling almost everyone up collectively, and those that do typically pivot toward unambiguous moral spectacle. In the hyper-mediated 21st century,…
Excepting the newly bicurious and the chronically polyamorous, most people will adore Erupcja for the wrong reasons. Pete Ohs’ sixth narrative feature has, on the…
As Bubi (Amerul Affendi), the dispassionate and dismally successful hustler of small scams, re-marries, he abandons his two sons, Ali (Idan Aedan) and Amir (Hadi…
Amid a churning torrent of acid gold, Hilal Baydarov’s Sermon to the Void unveils its true form, slipping away from its preambulatory parable into something…
As the Western world’s exemplar of an exotic and fantastical Orient, the city of Bangkok has fashioned itself into a locale of permissivity where sin…
“I wonder if it’s like being inside an aquarium,” remarks sixteen-year-old Choo Xin Yu (Ranice Tay) as she sits for her Ordinary Level examinations. Facing…
Siyou Tan’s debut feature, Amoeba, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival under its Discovery section, introducing a fresh and candid new voice in Singaporean…
Just as the prospect of taking root in one place imposes an uneasiness on the mind, so too does relocation prompt a restlessness of the…
The grist mill of capitalism has no shortage of critics today, incisive policymakers and inane pedants alike who know too well the anonymous and alienated…
Late in Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer, as army veteran Bill (David Strathairn) and his daughter-in-law Tammy (Jane Levy) visit an art gallery in their…
Writing in the second issue of the Southeast Asian film magazine MARG1N, Singaporean wunderkind Yeo Siew Hua lamented the incongruence between filmic and lived reality,…
The canary, a songbird of the finch family, occupies an eminent place in avian symbolism, not least for its melodious birdsong, which in turn underscores…