Released in 1997, Tsai Ming-liang’s The River extended what would become a de facto family trilogy in which the same actors reprise identical roles within…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From…
Describing Sofia Behrs Tolstaya, a diarist and photographer who remains better known as the wife of Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: “With her mangled intelligence,…
Typically regarded as a key director of the Taiwanese Second New Wave, Tsai Ming-liang and his debut theatrical feature Rebels of the Neon God exhibit,…
It may surprise you that Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang’s first feature-length film, Boys, has a quite significant relationship to British social realism. Made in 1991,…
For a world-renowned auteur, it’s surprisingly difficult to find information about Tsai Ming-liang’s early television work. It’s not clear if this is due to general…
Prior to the solidification of Tsai Ming-liang’s career, which is arguably realized with his first Lee Kang-Sheng collaboration (in the television commissioned project Boys), there…
In 1989, following the success of a prime-time Chinese Television System soap called Endless Love, which he worked on as a writer, Tsai Ming-liang directed…
In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed…
Liberté is gorgeous and confounding, a Brechtian presentation of passion, tedium and perversion. Albert Serra’s Liberté continues the director’s penchant for placing human rot, literal and metaphorical,…
The unfortunate irony of Porno is that it fails to leave its audience satisfied. If you are naming your new indie horror flick Porno, you…
The Wolf House is a darkly magical fairy tale of arthouse cinema. To describe a film as magical may be a usually empty judgment, but…
Quentin Dupieux’s latest delivers the expected outlandishness but won’t live long in viewers’ memories. The life of a sociopath is laid bare in Quentin Dupieux’s macabre…
Valley Girl doesn’t live up to its namesake, but Jessica Rothe continues to engender good will. From the film’s earliest moments, as Alicia Silverstone appears…
Balagov’s debut proves a heady look at individualism, but one ultimately less substantive than it initially suggests. Tribal frictions unfurl, both combative and internalized, when…
Driveways feels like a relic from another era, an aughts-era indie drama already past its expiration date. An air of melancholy hangs heavy over Andrew…
The Trip to Greece continues the series’ trend of increasingly mature developments and proves a satisfying end. The Trip to Greece, purportedly the closing installment…
With Fourteen, Dan Sallit continues to prove his skill as a masterfully rhythmic writer and purveyor of low-key humanism. Audiences aren’t exactly suffering from a dearth…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or…
The Vast of Night opens with an assured and prefatory walk-and-talk, an extended tracking shot that first follows first Everett (Jake Horowitz), a local radio show…