Distilled down to a one-sentence summary, the calmly melancholic Right Now, Wrong Then is the very essence of a Hong Sang-soo film: A bibulous…
Do we really need another portrait of a frustrated sad-sack young man, even if it comes in the form of one of Lee Chang-dong’s…
While bigscreen superheroes may stoke our fantasies of being something greater than we are, seeing more empathetic characters in that same space allows for…
Let the Sunshine In is an exquisite romantic comedy in part because its laughs are sad and its sadness is funny. Claire Denis isn’t…
Whatever its flaws (and they are myriad), director David Gordon Green’s Halloween is certainly a good looking film: Cinematographer Michael Simmonds mimics John Carpenter’s 1978…
For Hong Sang-soo, a filmmaker who usually favors fairly taut narrative structures, Hill of Freedom is something of a departure. The film operates in…
Our Sunhi is the culmination of a cycle of Hong Sang-soo films, each starring actress Jung Yoomi, about aspiring women filmmaker with a weakness for…
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon is an exemplary minor film, shaped more by its incidental pleasures than any grand design. It owes much of its charm…
In Another Country signals something of a shift in the approach of Hong Sang-soo’s films, one in which the director’s generally economically modest production…
Hong Sang-soo’s monochromatic, soju-soaked, metaphysical odyssey, The Day He Arrives, explores the question of whether or not one can ever really escape the past,…
“Things repeat themselves with differences I can’t understand,” proclaims Oki (Jung Yu-mi), the director of the fourth, and final, film-within-the-film that comprises Hong Sang-soo’s…
In 2011, right-wing extremists claimed the lives of 77 innocent civilians during the deadliest act of terrorism in Norway’s history. Paul Greengrass’s dramatization of this event in…
Director Antonio Mendez-Esparza’s Life and Nothing More is a minimalist portrait of mother-and-son strife, but that emotional center is contextualized by a larger exploration…
Gareth Evans made his name with martial arts films, but based on how shockingly violent The Raid and The Raid 2 are, it’s not…
Silence can be used as an effective tool in any film; it helps set the tone of a scene, builds tension, and can truly convey the intensity of a…
Originally conceived of as a gallery performance, Albert Serra’s Roi Soleil is more than a filmed theatre piece or a mere record of a performance…
These days, Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-liang seems deeply interested in the tiny variations of approach available to him in presenting the images of his…
No one would likely suggest that the dialogue and interactions in Ted Fendt’s previous films (comprising three shorts and 2016’s 61-minute debut feature, Short Stay) were naturalistic,…