Although The Flowers of St. Francis sits comfortably within one Roberto Rossellini’s most lauded creative stretches , it’s a work that still doesn’t exactly have a home in any of the three subcategories that have been parceled out from the director’s filmography: the neorealist…
Berlin Alexanderplatz fails to build to any climax that would justify its length, instead spinning out into infinity and confusing circuity for world-building. If Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz — one of the greatest pieces of modernist fiction produced during the 20th century,…
In Irene Gutiérrez’s Between Dog and Wolf, the relationship between past and present — and future — is vertiginous. We are left to deduce the time and place on the basis of some scattered memorabilia, and the age of the subjects. In the mountainous…
Under the guise of complacent nothingness, the characters of Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers manage to paradoxically enact and participate in sundry relationships, death drives, drug habits, clashes with authority, and everything in between. The events of May ‘68 sit at the center of the…
Cutting across Paris from the north to the south, the RER B is a commuter rail that shuttles passengers to and from the city center, moving between the northern Mitry-Mory commune and the southern Saint-Rémy-de-Provence commune. It is also the axis that Alice Diop’s…
Less a feature debut than a marked progression in a career of interdisciplinary video work, Prapat Jiwarangsan’s Ploy makes no attempts to distance itself from its creator’s tenure as an installation artist, even if it is in possession of an overarching narrative, and runs…
Drift Away’s opening is a three-tiered one; within not even the first five minutes, Xavier Beauvois simultaneously presents the relationship between local gendarme Laurent’s (Jérémie Renier) work and home life, while intercutting a bride and groom photoshoot morbidly interrupted by a suicide that will…
A whopping 13 features deep into their cinematic partnership, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were reaching a new apex of open acrimony in their relationship when they worked under the direction of Frank Tashlin on 1955’s Artists and Models, their penultimate film as a…
Eliding anything that could be considered a catalyzing event, Thai director Taiki Sakpisit’s feature debut The Edge of Daybreak is a film of buildups and aftermath, more concerned with the implicit effects engendered by instability, both personal and political. Opening with the whispered testimony…
Sode Yukiko has no qualms with announcing her Aristocrats as a literary project, unveiling its status as an adaptation of the novel Ano Ko wa Kizoku by Mariko Yamauchi before any credits, and even the title card. Its novelistic sweep is modest, but still…
