It’s unclear if the new film Gone with the Light is directly inspired by or otherwise wholesale lifting the premise of The Leftovers (both the…
Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and played every kind of…
Forgiven Children is a reactionary apologist’s straw man, an irresponsible configuration of centrist thought which aestheticizes and generalizes any viewpoints that would be positioned in…
Nomadland Having just taken the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Nomadland begins its journey towards Oscar gold. That’s admittedly a flip assessment…
Legally Declared Dead Anthony Wong is an axiom of Hong Kong cinema, an iconic actor who has featured in every conceivable film genre and played…
Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home for Asian action…
It’s not much of a surprise to discover that John Denver Trending is the feature debut of writer-director Arden Rod Condez. Given the opportunity to…
New Vietnamese film Rom has garnered comparisons to both Run Lola Run and Slumdog Millionaire, though it shares neither the gimmicky structure of either nor…
Unleashed & Geran Two very similar films in premise but vastly different in execution hit the festival this year. NYAFF is always a good home…
It would be easy to write off the dark comedy I predatori (The Predators, in English) as an exercise in nihilism. The corpse of Friedrich…
Mainstream Social media, as captured in cinema, is largely a trap. The past decade has demonstrated its allure among filmmakers, and it’s easy to understand…
Cuties is an impressive, complex coming-of-age narrative and a profound refutation of the nonsensical controversy that has arisen around it. The hysteria surrounding Maïmouna Doucouré’s…
From an aesthetic standpoint, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary or ambitious about Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. It’s a work that could just as easily function as…
Victim(s), the debut feature from Layla Zhuqing Ji, is the latest in a long line of cautionary tales in which it is made abundantly clear…
Sibyl is a film that feels richer at the margins than at the center, largely by design and to its credit. Victoria, Justine Triet’s last film, opens…
Beasts Clawing at Straws The new Korean crime thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws is a derivative, charmless bit of Tarantino-aping nonsense, a convoluted mess so…
Mulan fails as action spectacle and lazily cribs from the vast cinematic legacy it so loosely approximates. After such massive financial successes as Beauty and the…
Swanberg’s latest represents a savvy and mature return to his early-career mode of filmmaking. Fifteen years after his first feature, Joe Swanberg is back where…
Modern-day Cuba, as documented in Hubert Sauper’s latest foray into political ethnography, is a third-world island marked distinctly by the stamp of first-world capitalism. Co-existing…
Undergods is a crypto-anthology film that gradually morphs into a distaff network narrative, one of those everyone-is-connected type movies that were all the rage about…