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 22…
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 of…
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 surprising…
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 moment…
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 (although…
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 subjects…
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, or…
For our final dispatch from the 2018 New York Film Festival, we take a look at each of the features from the fest’s avant garde-themed Projections…
For Hong Sang-soo, whose working method and steady output has been, and continues to be, (relatively) unburdened by production constraints, the notion of artistic freedom…
True to its title, 2010’s Hahaha is very funny — amusing in ways that might even cloak its generous, searching ambition. The film follows two skirt-chasing, barely-employed…
Lengthy runtimes have never been totally essential to Hong Sang-soo’s work, but there is a certain quality intrinsic to his approach — how he crafts…
As with many Hong Sang-soo films, 2009’s Like You Know It All deliberately repeats itself: Goo Kyeong-nam (Kim Tae-woo), an arthouse director, goes on two nearly…
Hong Sang-soo’s 2009 film Night and Day marks many firsts for the director, including his first film shot on digital and his first to be…
As perhaps the most narratively straightforward Hong Sang-soo film to date, albeit one still prone to a certain structural mischievousness, Woman on the Beach modulates its conceptual restraint in…
With Caniba, the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory duo Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor turn their typically assured lens on Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who was deported from Paris in…
The first striking thing about 2006’s Woman Is the Future of Man is its blunt exhibition of various cruel and brutal sexual behaviors, which range…
In 2005’s Tale of Cinema, as in most of Hong Sang-soo’s works, structure is part of the story. The film is split into two halves,…
In Hong Sang-soo’s 2002 film On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, a young actor, Gyung-soo (Kim Sang-kyung), goes on vacation to visit an…
“I should correct something if it’s wrong,” says Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju), the titular virgin of 2000’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, to her smothering…
Two strong, entirely unrelated stories are told in 1998’s The Power of Kangwon Province — and Hong Sang-soo resorts to employing a third narrative to…