The scourges of the contemporary art world are many, but arguably the largest of them has to do with the widening disconnect between the sanctity…
With miscarriage after miscarriage of justice, the United States has all but exposed the amorality at the heart of its empire: first the Epstein files…
If one were to conjure an impression of the apocalypse, it might be in the heart of sound — a detonation so vast and infinite…
The haze of childhood offers considerable dwelling space for joy and grievance alike; forceful then but mostly latent now, these emotions nonetheless bear the transformative…
In any competitive race, the relevant agents can be organized as such: the spectators, who traditionally stay rooted to the spot and view its proceedings…
So rare is contemporary parlance’s penchant for the optimistic, and so sparse are its vocabularies for the beatific, that Cynthia Beatt’s monumental Heart of Light…
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…
It is tempting, in times like these, to ascribe to an archetype its particular incarnation, to historicize it one way or another. Such might be…
The Old Man and His Car There is a good deal of sentimental value, both real and inflated, in Michael Kam’s The Old Man and…
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…
The mental health epidemic has taken root globally, but only in the U.S. is it likelier to do so behind the barrel of a gun.…
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…
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…