In a late scene in Chameleon Street, Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s 1990 film, an astonishingly brilliant and wickedly comedic interrogation of American racism’s corrosive effects on those forced to navigate its nearly impossible psychic and societal demands, the film’s protagonist and antihero Douglas Street…
“I’m sorry if I doubted your good heart / Things always seem to end before they start.” A ruefully apologetic Lou Reed sings these words to the recently deceased Andy Warhol during “Hello It’s Me,” the final track of Songs for Drella, Reed and…
Tracing Her Shadow, the third feature by Song Pengfei (whose films are credited to just his given name), deals with a relatively little-known historical tragedy: the Japanese “war orphans” of World War II, the children left behind in the Manchurian northeastern region of China…
They’re called “silent movies,” but for the most part, films preceding the advent of cinema sound recording weren’t really silent. Though there wasn’t on-screen dialog, screenings often had some sort of musical accompaniment or improvised sound effects, whether live or previously recorded. In Japan,…
Malaysia-born, Osaka-based director, and self-described “cinema drifter” Kah Wai Lim has previously made films in his native Malaysia, Hong Kong, Osaka, Croatia, and Slovenia, quietly building one of the most interesting and eclectic filmographies in world cinema. Come and Go, his eighth feature, is…
“Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us, only sky.” On October 11, 1971, John Lennon released “Imagine,” the opening track and first US single from his sophomore solo album of the same name.…
Language Lessons never quite becomes more than an acting exercise, but it’s still offers up intriguing questions about the disparity between online and offline personae. Among the many effects of the Covid-19 pandemic is how it has radically transformed every aspect of cinema, including the…
Nearly a decade after his previous feature, the 2012 big-budget disaster movie tentpole The Tower — South Korea’s very belated answer to The Towering Inferno — director Kim Ji-hoon returns to the apartment-building-in-extreme-peril genre with Sinkhole, a goofy and super-dumb yet undeniably entertaining commercial…
Time, Ricky Ko’s debut feature after a decade of assistant directing, opens with its splashiest and most exciting sequence. Featuring a male and female assassin, along with their getaway driver, executing a hit, the scene utilizes comic-book freeze-frames in a sly homage to ’60s…
“And during the few moments that we have left, we want to talk right down to earth, in a language that everybody here can easily understand.” These recorded words from Malcolm X — an excerpt from his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots” —…
