Bertrand Mandico made quite a splash with his first feature-length film The Wild Boys in 2018, but he’s been making accomplished shorts for well over…
The Nest is a deeply obvious, under-cooked attempt at horror-flecked domestic portraiture. The Nest, writer-director Sean Durkin’s long-awaited follow-up to his remarkably assured debut feature, 2011’s…
Lahi, Hayop Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s filmography is virtually an exemplar of the temporal nexus of historical and contemporaneous representations of authoritarian exploitation.…
In the midst of the annus horribilis of 2020, with the US still being ravaged by a global pandemic, all manner of racial strife, a…
After the international success of Asghar Farhadi’s socio-familial, “realist” dramas, there were a litany of Iranian films that tried to copy the winning formula of…
It’s unclear if the new film Gone with the Light is directly inspired by or otherwise wholesale lifting the premise of The Leftovers (both the…
Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and played every kind of…
Forgiven Children is a reactionary apologist’s straw man, an irresponsible configuration of centrist thought which aestheticizes and generalizes any viewpoints that would be positioned in…
Nomadland Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip assessment…
Legally Declared Dead Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and played…
There never was a romance quite like it: beat poets/star-crossed lovers Exene Cervenka and John Doe form a little rock band with guitarist Billy Zoom…
Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home for Asian action…
It’s not much of a surprise to discover that John Denver Trending is the feature debut of writer-director Arden Rod Condez. Given the opportunity to…
New Vietnamese film Rom has garnered comparisons to both Run Lola Run and Slumdog Millionaire, though it shares neither the gimmicky structure of either nor…
Unleashed & Geran Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home…
It would be easy to write off the dark comedy I predatori (The Predators, in English) as an exercise in nihilism. The corpse of Friedrich…
Mainstream Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has demonstrated its allure among filmmakers, and it’s easy to understand…
Cuties is an impressive, complex coming-of-age narrative and a profound refutation of the nonsensical controversy that has arisen around it. The hysteria surrounding Maïmouna Doucouré’s…
From an aesthetic standpoint, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary or ambitious about Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. It’s a work that could just as easily function as…
Victim(s), the debut feature from Layla Zhuqing Ji, is the latest in a long line of cautionary tales in which it is made abundantly clear…
Sibyl is a film that feels richer at the margins than at the center, largely by design and to its credit. Victoria, Justine Triet’s last film, opens…