In Barbarian Invasion, retired actress Moon Lee (Tan Chui Mui, who also directs), not to be confused with actual retired martial arts actress Moon…
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…
Vacation Friends feels like the umpteenth trip to the same tired destination. A film whose spec script has been kicking around Hollywood for so long…
Wife of a Spy Though over three decades into his varied, distinctive career, American critics have only really paid Kiyoshi Kurosawa intermittent attention, almost…
Given our TikTok-conditioned attention spans, it’s not hard to imagine a future where movies are eventually whittled down to a mere 5 seconds, with…
Filmmakers Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo interpret the title of their new essayistic documentary Double Layered Town/Making a Song to Replace Our Position very…
In Johnnie To’s 2007 film Mad Detective, the eponymous cop is a gifted but troubled investigator who “sees” people’s inner personalities, which To visualizes…
The end of the Edo period in Japan in 1867 was basically the end of the samurai era, and has, accordingly, been the inspiration…
The Old Ways is a mid-budget genre gem with a few tricks up its sleeve to keep these fresh. Possessions and exorcisms have been…
He’s All That is a lazy, purely nostalgia-driven dud that rehashes without imagination or innovation. The very real nostalgia that exists for 1999’s She’s…
With the release of last year’s conversational documentary Leap of Faith: In Conversation with William Friedkin, one thing has become abundantly clear — people…
Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman, freely adapted from a Clive Barker short story, is the tale of a white academic who inadvertently summons a…
It might surprise Western viewers watching the raw portrait of youth in Snowball to learn that its writer/director Lee Woo-jung has spent the last…
What We Left Unfinished never moves past the basic work of archivalism. 1921. 1989. 2021. The cycles of imperial superpowers invading, occupying, and summarily abandoning…
Whirlybird ultimately disappoints with its own kind of bland journalism. Charting the professional milestones and personal travails of Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard, the dynamic…
American Sausage Standoff is even more asinine than its title suggests. The first question that must be asked of American Sausage Standoff has to be:…
The minor miracle of Playing God is that it somewhat works despite its obviously stupid conceit. One would be forgiven for mistaking the new con artist…
New rom-com The Con-Heartist comes courtesy of director Mez Tharatorn, a filmmaker who made a name for himself in his native Thailand with 2012’s…