To delve into the world of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU. is to forgo the comfortable spectatorial positions of detachment and objectivity, and submit to its fantastical reconstruction of a totalitarian empire. Already, viewers versed in the megalomaniac dictatorships of auteurs and visionaries might balk; and that’s to…
Finding Yingying smartly avoids its early promise of true-crime procedural in favor of something more rawly emotional. Mere weeks after her arrival in the United States, Yingying Zhang, a visiting scholar from Peking University, went missing and was presumed dead. An avid agricultural student with…
Fernanda Valadez’s debut, while sometimes frustratingly broad, tells a well-known tale through unusual eyes, giving the classic immigration tale a welcome twist. Within a cinematic tradition that associates the violence of Mexico’s crime-infested northern border with the high-stakes machismo of drug cartels and CIA…
Dreamland is a beautiful, lite-Malickian effort than smartly boasts both gorgeous, mythopoeic expositions and thrilling storytelling. Set during the Great Depression and amidst the dusty storms of small-town Texas, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s sophomore effort Dreamland opens with intoxicating narration courtesy of the half-sister of the film’s…
Woody Allen’s long-delayed latest isn’t among the director’s most psychologically incisive works, but its minor-key efforts reflect a curious transposition of the director’s old-fashioned absorptions onto a modern metropolitan setting. Make no mistake — Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York is far…
Ham on Rye is a welcome departure from the typical trappings of a coming-of-age film. Coming-of-age narratives make up a significant proportion of contemporary independent cinema, and by extension the titles that an ever-growing number of Gen Zs and even millennials flock to. It…
Perhaps the most unbefitting title to arrive in the middle of a global pandemic, Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles defies the current for two reasons. That its titular appendage serves a wholly positive function — of cheerful and robust consumption — rather than reflecting the fearful…
“There is no here here” — so encapsulates the thematic and ontological dimensions of Heinz Emigholz’s wryly self-deprecating latest. A consistently infuriating and possibly even glib attempt at psychoanalysis, The Lobby entraps its viewers within an impossible game of dialectics, pitting bombastic pronouncements and…
Like R.W. Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Under the Open Sky opens with an aging man being released from prison after serving thirteen years for murder. During his out-processing, the warden glances through the records and, in perhaps an attempt to relieve their unhappy burden, asks…
The spectre of doom looms over the besieged town of Srebrenica for the entirety of Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, but the portended massacre only occurs towards its end, summed up in just a handful of shots. And all the better for the film…
