The timely and harrowing MLK/FBI explores a particular American history that isn’t so safely in the past. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is now a near-universally revered and beloved historical icon, but as Sam Pollard’s meticulous and quietly infuriating documentary MLK/FBI shows,…
American Utopia provides a brief respite from reality and leaves the viewer hopeful for what’s to come. 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 severe economic…
Godard’s famous axiom (by way of D.W. Griffith) about a girl and a gun being the essential elements of a movie is given a very literal demonstration in Rae Red’s grim and despairing solo directorial debut The Girl and the Gun. The narrative is…
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 severe economic crisis, and a supremely mendacious and inhumane presidential administration lording over it all, releasing a film entitled…
In its first half, Liao Ming-yi‘s debut feature, I WeirDo, fits the mode of the cute, quirky rom-com. It bears down hard on its appropriately oddball flourishes: the strange typography of its English title; the bright, candy-colored cinematography, often resembling an exploding bag of…
Ivo Van Aart’s darkly comic horror film The Columnist fits solidly within the well-worn genre of serial killer/slasher flick. However, Van Aart and screenwriter Daan Windhorst invest the material with a decidedly woke feminist slant, paying particular attention to women’s challenges in navigating the…
Haruhiko Arai is a four-decade veteran screenwriter and director specializing in erotic films, cutting his teeth with the legendary pink film auteur Koji Wakamatsu, and going on to become a key screenwriter of Nikkatsu’s roman porno genre. In more recent years, Arai scripted some…
The depiction of sex work in cinema usually does one of a couple things: bears down on the eroticizing, titillating aspects, indulges in moralistic hand-wringing, or employs some combination of the two. To its credit, Life: Untitled, Kana Yamada’s debut feature, adapted from her…
The title of Myanmar-born, Taiwan-based Midi Z’s fourth fiction feature, The Road to Mandalay, conjures Kipling-esque Orientalist visions of the far east. But this starkly rendered yet poetic film offers the exact opposite, focusing on characters forced to navigate the merciless present-day realities of national borders,…
Samurai Marathon, NYAFF’s opening night film, is a rather odd bird. It’s a Japanese jidaigeki period-piece from British director Bernard Rose (Candyman, Immortal Beloved) and British producer Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor, Thirteen Assassins), with composer Philip Glass and costume designer Emi Wada adding…
