“You tell me things I never found in Plato or Hegel.” Romantic expressions like this abound in Isiah Medina’s latest, Gangsterism, a film noir set…
In the 1960s, the genre that would become known in Japan as pinku eiga had just taken shape. This was a genre that dealt explicitly…
By 1919, 24-year-old Richard Barthelmess was already a star. He’d just played the leading man, albeit in yellow-face, in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms opposite…
Those who have seen the Zürcher twins’ other works, The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider, may have felt a tension building…
In director Nicolás Pereda’s Copper, Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Rodríguez) discovers a corpse by the side of the road. It’s unusual enough for him to…
Like many of you, I first discovered the French New Wave as a budding cinephile in high school. It was my introduction to how the…
So many of the dialogues between mortals and immortals in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò end with the gods in agreement that the divines share…
Ah, but first: an introduction. This is the first entry of Flashback, a new column hosted by In Review Online. Here, I play your very…
Why is it that in the nation of Spain, a nation whose siestas evince a clear cultural supremacy over their efficiency-imprisoned neighbors, regularly invites very…
What’s so titillating about Hong Kong? Certain cities have sex appeal, of course — it’s easier to imagine a ménage à trois in Paris than…
The soldiers of Roberto Minervini’s The Damned play cards, wander around, and casually debate theology. The year is 1862, and these Union soldiers find themselves…
Masculinity has long been amorphous and tricky; it’s an endlessly fascinating and complex concept to all except those who need it and those who sell…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve…
In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I wanted to…
Though plenty of movies have been made either focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic in a literal way, and even more movies had been converted into…
Few works of art have a history as rousing or enigmatic as Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. The tale goes something like this: Goya, possibly very…
Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be…
Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel, these…
The key word in the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is “sorrows,” translated from the German Leiden, which really…
The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly in-joke of changing…