Anime visionary Masaaki Yuasa’s first feature since his 2004 breakthrough Mind Game (though kid-friendly Lu Over the Wall made it to the U.S. first), The…
Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance is one of the most idiosyncratic feature debuts at this year’s NDNF. As with Ambrose’s NDNF-programmed short film Spiral Jetty, the scenario here is rife…
Minding the Gap begins by opaquely tracing the lives of three skateboarding high schoolers — including the film’s director, Bing Liu — in their economically…
Releasing a steady stream of vaguely jingoistic docudramas all starring Mark Wahlberg as a hero/patriot, Peter Berg has become a bit of a joke as…
Here’s a movie about Jason Statham fighting a gigantic killer prehistoric shark. That’s all it is. The Meg spends not much time setting up its premise…
Beware the pseudo-experimental feature film that begins with a declaration that ‘this is a metaphor.’ Madeline’s Madeline is the third feature film directed by Josephine Decker, but you’d never…
Japan Cuts—the largest program of new Japanese films in North America—just wrapped its 12th annual edition earlier this week. Our one and only dispatch from the…
Carlo de los Santos Arias‘s Cocote moves from a wealthy estate in Santo Domingo to the town of Oviedo, using a personal tale of revenge to examine political, religious,…
Valérie Massadian’s follow-up to her acclaimed (and still undistributed) 2011 debut Nana is precisely controlled, but without ever resorting to a clinical distance from its subject.…
It’s not until around the 20-minute mark that Mori, the Artist’s Habitat fleetingly entertains a notion of conflict. An inn manager begs famed oil painter…
Charting the emotional whiplash experienced by a young girl as she develops a crush on a classmate who subsequently gets together with her high school…
In attempting to navigate some difficult familial terrain in a similar vein as her contemporary, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yukiko Mishima ultimately fails to escape rote contrivance…
Combining absurdist horror with social realism, Good Manners takes the werewolf fable and deconstructs it within the context of modern Brazilian society, taking into account…
The Mission: Impossible series has gone from a gauzy star vehicle to a very referendum on said star as (to quote a character from the last movie) the “living manifestation…
It could be that Stephen Susco, the first-time director of improbable horror-sequel Unfriended: Dark Web, is just a previously-undistinguished virtuoso, here aided by a team…
The Equalizer provided a perfectly serviceable delivery device for bloody violence. The 2014 film starred Denzel Washington as former C.I.A. assassin-turned-neighborhood do-gooder Robert McCall, who memorably carved up, blew…
From the title alone, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s follow-up to After the Storm is unlikely to elicit the usual comparisons to Ozu; broadly speaking, The Third Murder…
The 17th edition of the New York Asian Film Festival came to a close last Sunday. We already published one dispatch from the fest, focussing on some of…
Sunny Chan’s debut film, Men on the Dragon, is about four middle-aged men who work at a Hong Kong telecommunications company and signed up for a dragon…
Chinese cinematographer-turned-director Dong Yue’s very, very rainy neo-noir The Looming Storm seems, for a while, like it may be doing something pretty impressive. While the film…