Growing up is a complicated mess. That has always seemed to be the primary message behind most — if not all — coming-of-age films about…
At their core, and among other things, great documentaries draw viewers in by focusing on compelling subjects and structuring their stories in captivating ways. Whether…
Although his name may be unfamiliar to some, Chinese director Wei Shujun has already made several feature films, including 2021’s Ripples of Life, which also…
Where does a song come from? And how does it happen? In November 2021, driven back inside to obsess about air particles again thanks to…
Nearly the entire 90-minute runtime of Tim MacKenzie-Smith’s Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande is filled with the titular band’s music. This never feels…
In his cryptic new film Whale Bones, Takamasa Oe attempts a “how we live now” exploration of disaffected youth and the aimless ennui of modern…
Without further context, one could be forgiven for conflating Skywalkers: A Love Story with yet another Star Wars spinoff. Donning the Jedi’s patronymic and draped…
In the canon of the silent cinema, only once has it been truly silent. The purifying beam of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc,…
Passion projects like Kubi almost always deserve greater appreciation and more careful interest than a mere evaluation of their qualitative values can merit. Takeshi Kitano…
The sixth Herman Yau film released in the last two years is probably the strangest. Long a denizen of Hong Kong’s underground, making his name…
Nicole Riegel’s debut feature Holler was an unusually sharp bit of indie realism, an unvarnished look at economic depression in the aftermath of NAFTA via a…
Released the same summer as Independence Day, Jan de Bont’s 1996 special effects bonanza Twister helped kick off the late-’90s/early-2000s disaster movie glut. It’s a…
With enough practice, seemingly anything can become normal, even the working practice of Shunji Iwai. For the better part of his career, Iwai’s melodramas of…
Crossing opens with a title card stating that Georgian and Turkish are gender-neutral languages, with grammar not containing gender-oriented articles. We then are introduced to…
Upon initial release in 2016, Shin Godzilla — the product of co-directors Hideaki Anno (creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Shinji Higuchi (storyboard/SFX artist) —…
Absence — no matter how great or small — creates mystery. Mystery inspires intrigue or, at the very least, interest. Interest encourages active engagement: we…
The clean and well-organized business environs of Sho Miyake’s All the Long Nights seem to come straight from the catalogue; the city skyline casts an…
Parables, as with social satires, have been considered both ripe for adaptation and stubbornly resistant to reinterpretation; although Kafka and Orwell have seen their fair…
“None of my films are realistic, and certainly not naturalistic, including Sound and Fury, even though it touched on a certain social reality. They all…
Perhaps the first film where an alien ice mummy fails a breathalyzer test, Jesse Thomas Cook’s The Hyperborean aims for nothing less than the sort…