China retrofit its communism with capitalism, so why shouldn’t it augment an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-indebted premise with the procedural plot points of Minority Report?…
Starting out as a bit of meta-commentary on a notorious massacre, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark quickly and deliberately questions its own point of…
Alan Mak and Felix Chong, two-thirds of the team behind the very good Infernal Affairs series and the prime movers of the mediocre-at-best Overheard trilogy, team up again for Extraordinary Mission, a…
Alice Lowe’s character in Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers was named Tina; in her own directorial debut, Prevenge, she plays Ruth. Really, though, the different names don’t matter:…
Eduardo Williams’s debut feature, The Human Surge, may well benefit from a second look, but it doesn’t incentivize one. That’s certainly not for lack of ambition: Structured…
Park Kwang-hyun’s Fabricated City seems at first to play its premise straight: Kwon Yoo (Ji Chan-wool) uses a popular MMO game to escape from the growing…
Duckweed is a Chinese Back to the Future with quite a bit of Capra in it. Celebrated novelist (and rally car driver) Han Han rebounds from 2014 road…
Whether one enjoys Son of Joseph will depend on how well one takes to Eugene Green’s very particular style. Favoring declamatory acting, controlled framing and…
Ted Fendt’s first feature, the refreshingly droll Short Stay, centers on Mike (Mike MacCherone), a passive, socially awkward twenty-something living in New Jersey. When Mark…
Ever since Quentin Tarantino arrived, and especially since his Kill Bill and Grindhouse films, the market has seen a deluge of faux-exploitation garbage—from high profile stuff like Robert…
Ti West has repeatedly demonstrated himself capable of a certain kind of virtuosic genre craft, enough at least for it to seem like he could one day…
Keith Maitland’s Tower continues this year’s streak of excellent documentaries. The film concerns the deadly mass shooting that occurred on August 1, 1966 from the top…
Focusing on the daughter of well-known Edo-period Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, the episodic, contemplative anime biopic Miss Hokusai gingerly examines young O-ei’s growth as an artist in…
An aesthetic tour-de-force if also an empty and unfailingly derivative one, actor Brady Corbet’s directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader, is based on a Jean-Paul Sartre short story,…
Despite a slew of savvy would-be war-propaganda films in the 1940s (headed by David O. Selznick’s Since You Went Away) that made the plight of army wives…