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…
The visual style of young Taiwanese director Huang Xi’s debut film, Missing Johnny, bears resemblance to the once-prominent New Wave movement established by his countrymen…
Operation Red Sea, Hong Kong director Dante Lam’s latest military epic and follow-up to 2016’s Operation Mekong, is also loosely based on a true story:…
Jeong Ga-young’s Hit the Night has drawn comparisons to the films of Hong Sang-soo, likely because it features a lot of drinking, even more talking,…
The 17th edition of the New York Asian Film Festival comes to a close this Sunday, and as usual the program offers a massive, sprawling slate…
Using the classic yakuza crime-thriller Battles Without Honor and Humanity as a key text of inspiration, The Blood of Wolves tries to peddle tired cliches…
A transfer student targeted by classmates in her small, rural town exacts hyperbolically gory vengeance in Liverleaf, Eisuke Naito’s adaptation of a cult-horror manga by…
Jeon Go-woon’s debut feature Microhabitat offers a conceptually ambitious and thematically rich premise: a young woman named Miso (Esom) — who leads a simple, balanced…
Nearly 30 years on, to the day, from the release of Die Hard — the movie about a guy fighting terrorists in a really tall building…
Just as 2015’s Ant-Man felt like a welcome respite after world-exploding Avengers entry Age of Ultron, so too does its sequel come as a balm after Infinity War killed pretty…
Yesterday, we presented our Top 10 Albums of the Year (So Far). Today, we do the same for film — which also gives us the chance to…
Just in time for an ironic Independence Day release, The First Purge is another meaningless prequel that answers questions no one asked or needed answered. While it seems undeniably important…
The BAMcinemaFest wrapped its 10th edition earlier this week. We already covered some of the festival’s selections here. For our final dispatch, we look at a handful…
One room, six cameras, thirty-something individuals — these are the spare elements with which Leigh Ledare constructs The Task, a scintillating study of group dynamics…
In Xavier Legrand’s Custody, viewers may get the sense that instead of the domestic drama this has been billed as, what they’re in fact watching is something much closer…
Debra Granik’s new film works best when it doesn’t allow the purity of its empathy to get in the way of its critique of the…
Right off the bat, Sicario: Day of the Soldado gooses you with its ripped-from-the-headlines reactionary nastiness. Terrorists are in league with the drug cartels and the Somali…
Araby opens with a teenage boy biking home to take care of his sick younger brother, his parents nowhere in sight. He spends the next…
The 2018 BAMcinemaFest, the 10th edition of the annual festival, kicked off Wednesday and runs until Sunday, July 1st. It has, over the last decade, established itself…