Xue Ma’s films are radically unique. There’s a strange romance, explicit and implicit, and a profane magic that permeates the Chinese ex-pat’s White River (2023),…
Ryuya Suzuki’s Jinsei is clearly a labor of love. Completed over an 18-month period, Suzuki wrote, directed, hand-drew, and scored the film, his feature debut,…
In an early scene in Igarashi Kohei’s Super Happy Forever, Sano (Hiroki Sano) confronts a child on the beach. It’s a scene that feels devoid…
If what Emmanuel Levinas said about the human face is true — that it “orders and ordains” us — then sudden, violent facial destruction signals…
Couture’s scenario reads like something straight out of the 1950s. Three women — an ingenue model from a humble background, a struggling makeup artist with…
The nexus of trite and thesis-like is where Lilian T. Mehrel’s Honeyjoon coalesces; a light, personal rumination on the shared experience of grieving, Mehrel’s easygoing…
Two young boys, one reserved and one outgoing, become fast friends at elementary school in Kohei Kadowaki’s ambitious and thoughtful animated film We Are Aliens,…
Among civilized Europe, the French as a collective may have a unique predilection for social dysfunction, or at least a unique openness to confronting and…
As an adult, returning to watch a beloved film from childhood can be a most delightful experience. That which charmed you then may still charm…
Argentinian filmmaker Lucio Castro likes it when you don’t quite know what you’re looking at. His first feature, End of the Century, was a time-travel…
One of the funny little indignities of life is that as men hit their 50s, reaching a stage when many are arguably at their peak…
In 2017’s Summer 1993, director Carla Simón’s feature debut, a young girl is sent to live with her mother’s family in Barcelona after her mother’s…
In his trilogy of novels about the adolescence and adulthood of a young man closely modeled on himself, Edmund White distilled the essence of what…
Since its debut 151 years ago, Georges Bizet’s enduring and controversial opera Carmen has inspired dozens of adaptations across mediums as varied as film, Broadway,…
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square is a place made out of dates. Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 —…
The animated documentary, by its very definition, is contradictory. Neither form wants to acknowledge the other’s existence because doing so shatters the convenient illusion that…
In a fictional New York City, a wolf stalks through the night. This isn’t a typical wolf. She’s not prowling for a kill. This wolf…
Immediately obvious in Supergirl is that it seems determined not to be seen as merely a sequel to, or a full spinoff of, James Gunn’s…
There’s no place like home. For Joe (Seth Rogen), home has metastasized into such a calamity that it’s all he can think about when he’s…
Sebastián Lelio’s The Wave swiftly announces itself as a musico-political spectacle. Music as activism, activism as music, but mostly — and sorely — musical activism.…