The Swordsman is hamstrung by weak direction that has no idea how to shoot its otherwise well-choreographed action set pieces. The disgraced and retired warrior at the center of Choi Jae-hoon’s The Swordsman is a cipher. Given the slightest bit of backstory and played by…
For nearly as long as humans have been eating and screwing, food and sex have been linked in philosophy, science, and art. Edible aphrodisiacs have been mythologized for nearly all of recorded history, the term food porn has been in use since at least…
Jonathan Ogilvie’s Lone Wolf, a political thriller told almost entirely through mock surveillance footage, has an admittedly good hook. The police are surveilling Conrad, the radical owner of an anarchist books and (presumably non-anarchist) porn store, as he becomes embroiled in a plot to…
At the beginning of Karen Cinnore‘s Mayday, Ana, a caterer living out of her car and beaten down by the casual misogyny that makes her life miserable, feels called to stick her head in an oven by an otherworldly voice. When she does so, she…
Earwig and the Witch is one of the ugliest major studio animated works in years and an incredible stumble for Studio Ghibli. Name recognition has little to do with luminaries Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata’s placement atop the anime pantheon. No, what makes Studio Ghibli’s…
In Cryptozoo, artist and animator Dash Shaw concocts an unusual story about cryptids, which, for cryptozoological initiates, are mythical creatures of legend like Bigfoot, El Chupacabra, or the Jersey Devil. But instead of a story about a couple who go into the woods and…
Queen of Black Magic is a brutal, go-for-break bit of exciting horror filmmaking. Kimo Stamboel doesn’t have the same profile as Timo Tjahjanto, his filmmaking partner in The Mo Brothers. Ever since Indonesia’s foremost purveyors of the grotesque fucked up and went solo, Tjahjanto has…
If there’s any director working today that understands what Nicolas Cage means when he describes his style as “nouveau shamanic,” it’s Sion Sono. Cage and Sono work through similar means, a highly-stylized and often wildly over-the-top expressivity, getting at the emotional truths that make…
When Martin remarks at the wonder of being out of the house for the first time in four months, Alma, his guide into the woods in which they’ve made camp, replies that it’s only a matter of time before the COVID pandemic is over…
Penguin Bloom tries to expand itself a bit from template filmmaking, but mostly still trades in familiar disability narrative tropes and obvious metaphors. Regrettably, there is no penguin in Penguin Bloom. Instead, the title refers to an injured magpie adopted by the sons of…
