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…
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…