In a city-state as vibrant and fast-paced as Singapore, the encroachment of work into various facets of social life appears inevitable, so much so that…
If stardom, traditionally, was a superhero who fought the bad guys and saved the world, then the fief of anonymity would fall to their unseen…
There is a good deal of sentimental value, both real and inflated, in Michael Kam’s The Old Man and His Car, most glaringly clued in…
The concert film documents the ecstasies of performance; the biopic narrativizes its painstaking preparations. In between these two modes stands the rehearsal film, capturing the…
Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s…
Now in its 36th edition, the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) has taken on a most prominent role within the country’s cultural landscape, drawing younger…
In Japan, where customs and a sturdy veneer of politeness greatly determine how people interact with one another, there is a strong emphasis on propriety,…
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…
Shrouded in painterly dimness, Lotfy Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son opens with a scene of the Nativity, wrought with bleak naturalism: a boy is born to…
“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…