With all the upheaval in recent years, it seems like there is only one constant across the film industry: producing an independent animated feature is…
Russell Crowe plays ex-cop Roy Freeman in the mystery thriller Sleeping Dogs, a film that feels like it was made dispassionately by a committee of…
Well into his 70s and his fifth decade working among the most prominent figures in Sinophone cinema, Zhang Yimou continues with Article 20, a tragicomic…
As Mel Gibson’s star was rising in the 1980s, he was becoming increasingly self-destructive. By the peak of his fame in the ’90s, he was…
The last decade has seen disillusionment and negativity about feature filmmaking expand from the grumblings of enthusiasts to a near-universal consensus that they’re not making…
The last decade has seen a dramatic metamorphosis of Chinese documentary. The vibrant independent and zero-budget documentary ecosystem of the 2000s — from which ambitious…
After a shamelessly nepotistic career reboot last year with Snipers, a high-profile blockbuster directed with (and seemingly largely by) her father Zhang Yimou, Zhang Mo…
A police investigation into the attempted murder of a fictional city’s vice mayor (Zhang Guoli), led by his percipient yet underachieving policeman son (Lei Jiayin),…
Youth (Spring) arrives in the midst of something of an inflection point: The West’s orientation toward China has shifted radically since Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang…
Jethro Tull’s long-awaited return with 2022’s The Zealot Gene — their first album in two decades — was something of a small triumph. It gave…
Zhang Lu has proved a unique presence in 21st-century film: A Korean-Chinese literary intellectual of the 1980s who became a little-known cult figure in the…
For most people, the protests on January 6, 2021, represent a dismal blight on American history; a rot that had corroded its way to the…
Huang Ji is among the last handful of Chinese directors to sneak through the portal distribution company dGenerate Films, the center of an important 2000s…
Like the best fiction for young children, the secret to Roald Dahl’s bibliography is its sensory qualities, that it can unlock new pathways in the…
In 1963, John Wayne was just as much the face of the Western genre as he had been since 1939. The Duke’s charisma, one-size-fits-all philosophy…
In 1962, the great Scottish-Canadian film theorist John Grierson gave a talk at the University of North Carolina on his seminal period in 1920s USA,…
One of the central tensions in cinema is that of authenticity: The inherent power of this medium comes from its depiction of images and experiences…